This article reports a qualitative study of the reception of Danish television news. A linguistic discourse analysis was made of a news programme and of the transcripts of in-depth interviews concerning each news story. The findings suggest that viewers may reconstruct the news through reference to a small number of highly generalized `super-themes'. The super-themes point to the influence of socially derived strategies for understanding news that are common to interpretive communities. The wider implications of super-themes and interpretive communities for research into the reception and social uses of mass communication are considered in the final part of the article.
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