Abstract

This chapter presents a discourse-analytical approach to the media. Discourse analysis emphasizes the obvious, but as yet not fully explored fact that media “messages” are specific types of text and talk. The theories and methods of the new interdisciplinary field of discourse analysis may be brought to bear in a more systematic and explicit account of the structures of media messages. Since discourse analysis is a multi-disciplinary enterprise, it is also able to relate this structural account to various properties of the cognitive and sociocultural context. Because the other chapters of this book pay detailed attention to the production, reception, uses, and sociocultural functions of media discourse, the present chapter only briefly deals with such a broader study of those aspects of mass communication.