Roger FowlerLanguage in the News
Discourse and Ideology in the Press
Acknowledgements Xl
1 Introduction: the importance of language in the
news 1
2 The social construction of news 10
Bias or representation 10
News values 12
Stereotypes 17
Social and economic Jactors in news selection 19
3 Language and representation 25
The linguistic background 26
Anthropological linguistics: language, culture and thought 28
Functional linguistics, variation, social semiotic 32
Social semiotic in news discourse: an example 38
Discourse and the reader 41
4 Conversation and consensus 46
The 'public idiom' and the Jormation oj consensus 46
Consensus and contradiction 48
Categorization and conversation 54
Oral models in the Press 59
5 Analytic tools: critical linguistics 66
Linguistic tools 68
Transitivity 70
Some syntactic transformations oj the clause 76
Lexical structure 80
Interpersonal elements: modality 85
Interpersonal elements: speech acts 87
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x Contents
6 Discrimination in discourse: gender and power 91
Personalization 91
Discrimination 93
Discrimination and power 105
7 Terms of abuse and of endearment 110
Rambo and the mad dog 112
Postscript 119
8 Attitudes to power 120
Ideological roles of the Press 120
The dominance of the status quo: hospital patients as
powerless 124
~w~o. 1~
9 A Press scare: the salmonella-in-eggs affair 146
Press hysteria 146
Participants 151
Chronology 153
Some aspects of hysterical style 160
10 The salmonella-in-eggs affair: Pandora's box 170
What am I? 170
Pandora's box: generating and equating new instances 174
'What am P' revisited 178
Closing Pandora's box: what are you going to do about
~? 181
Blame the housewife 186
The persistence of paradigms 202
11 Leading the people: editorial authority 208
12 Conclusion: prospects for critical news analysis 222
Notes 235
Index
