Van Dijk - A Discourse Approach To Media Analysis

THE STUDY OF NEWS

INTRODUCTION: GOALS AND PROBLEMS A Discourse Approach to Media Analysis

The aim of this book is to propose a new theoretical framework for the study of news in the press. The main feature of our approach is to analyze news primarily as a type of text or discourse. The first major consideration in such an analysis is the structures of news discourse, such as the variouslevels or dimensions of description and the units or categories used to explicitly characterize such levels or dimensions. This analysis should answer the important question about the structural specifics of news discourse as compared to other types of discourse. For instance, in English we may use the term "news story, - and this suggests that news might be a special kind of narrative. Yet, we alsoknow that it differs from the kind of stories we tell in everyday conversations or in children's books or in novels. Hence, we must specify why and how news stories are different. Similarly, news in the press is a specific kind of mass media discourse, which suggests possible family resemblances with news on radio and TV or with other discourse types in the newspaper, such as editorials oradvertisements. Such a qualitative approach to the news is typical for the various branches of the new discipline

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INTRODUCTION: GOALS AND PROBLEMS

of discourse analysis, including text linguistics, narrative analysis, stylistics or rhetoric. In the next chapter we address this textual dimension of the news. Yet, this is only part of the story. Discourse analysis is an interdisciplinarydiscipline. It is also interested in the analysis of the various contexts of discourse, that is, in the cognitive processes of production and reception and in the sociocultural dimensions of language use and communication. Therefore, the second major question to be answered deals with the processes involved in the production, the understanding and the uses of news in the context of mass-mediatedcommunication. In particular, we are interested in the complex relationships between news text and context: How do cognitive and social constraints determine the structures of news and how are the understanding and the uses of news influenced by its textual structures? Obviously, our approach to news is especially relevant for mass communication research if we are able to specify such relationships. Ifnot, our analysis would at most contribute to a new, and more explicit content analysis of media messages. Although this would certainly be a legitimate aim, we would he unable to place such an analysis within a more interesting explanatory and theoretical framework. We also want to know why news has its particular structure and what role such structures play in mass communication. A single bookcannot possibly answer all of these questions. Our aims must be more restricted. A single monograph could be dedicated to, for instance, the style of news discourse or to the uses of news by the readers. Therefore, we focus on topics that have been neglected in earlier research, that is on news structures and their cognitive processing, both in production and in understanding. For instance, wepropose a partial theory of so-called news schemata, that is, of the conventional forms and categories of news articles in the press. From a cognitive point of view, we deal with the memory processes involved in the understanding, representation, and retrieval of news events by the journalist in news gathering and writing and by the reader in processes of reconstructing news events in knowledge andbelief updating. This allows us to make explicit the well-known role of news values and ideologies in the production and understanding of news. Since such values and ideologies are also inherently social, we thus hope to build a bridge between the psychological and the sociological studies of news. Indeed, the psychological dimension of our study is not merely cognitive. Rather, it should be called...