Abstract
News Discourse, co-authored by Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple, focuses on the discourse of news drawing upon linguistic and semiotic theories. The book consists of nine chapters and could be roughly divided into three parts.
The first part includes the first three chapters. Chapter 1 addresses how news discourse is defined and offers the main approaches to news discourse in both linguistics and media/journalism and communication studies. News discourse is contextualized from a perspective of media communication in both Chapters 2 and 3. In Chapter 2, the authors situate news discourse in a communicative context, concerning how news is produced and consumed, and, further, in a wider socio-historical context with reference to external factors along with news media development, such as media technology, funding and the law. Chapter 3 attends in detail to news values.
The second part covers Chapters 4 to 7 and forms the essential discussion of the book. Chapter 4 mainly focuses on news writing in newspapers; the features of news headlines especially are analysed. The authors suggest that news writing varies across the news platforms and note that ‘this output of news process may interact with a whole range of factors, of various kinds, including belief assumptions, local style guides, media form, media laws, economic factors, deadlines and the news cycle, etc.’ (p. 107). In Chapter 5, the communicative functions of images are examined in detail. Images in news discourse are said to perform illustrative, evidential, sensational, iconic, evaluative and aesthetic functions. The authors suggest that text–image relations in televisual news discourse, where the visual and verbal tracks co-work, employ three kinds of strategies: overlap, displacement and dichotomy; they maintain that these relations exist not only between words and images, but also between clauses/sentences and between shots (p. 124). Similarly, for an in-depth analysis of text–image relations in still images, the authors apply the aforementioned categories of overlap, displacement and dichotomy to an image’s relations to a caption, a headline, a body text and the text–image relations in a sequenced gallery. The authors point out that the first three relations deal with intersemiotic relations (image vs verbal text) and the last one holds both intersemiotic (image vs caption) and intrasemiotic (image vs image; caption vs caption) relations. Chapters 6 and 7 recommend two specific frameworks (evaluation and composition) for an in-depth analysis of language and image in news discourse.
The third part, Chapters 8 and 9, includes two case studies: one is the analysis of an image and the evaluation of language in a ‘stand-alone’ news story (Chapter 8) and the other is a study of online news, using the concepts suggested in this book (Chapter 9).
Distinct from other books on media discourse, this volume contextualizes news discourse from the perspective of news communication (between the news producers and the news audience). Furthermore, the book offers some insights and exemplary analysis to the interplay between the verbal and the image represented in news discourse (Chapters 7 to 9). However, this attempt is much more focused on the play between the verbal and the still images typical in newspaper or online news. Relations between the words and the dynamic images in broadcast news or the news in social media platforms have not been systematically mapped and analysed.
In any case, it is understandable that, due to space constraints, News Discourse cannot be loaded with all aspects of news across genres and media platforms. Nonetheless, it sorts out the key issues explicitly or implicitly concerned with news discourse and it will serve a useful purpose as a resource book for scholars and teachers in media discourse and media communication studies.