News As Discourse

by Teun A. van Dijk

First Published in 1990. This book presents a new, interdisciplinary theory of news in the press. Against the background of developments in discourse analysis, it is argued that news should be studied primarily as a form of public discourse. Whereas in much mass communication research, the economic, social, or cultural dimensions of news and news media are addressed, the present study emphasizes the importance of an explicit structural analysis of news reports. Such an analysis should provide a qualitative alternative to traditional methods of content analysis. Also, attention is paid to processes of news production by journalists and news comprehension by readers, in terms of the social cognitions of news participants. In this way news structures can also be explicitly linked to social practices and ideologies of news making and, indirectly, to the institutional and macro-sociological contexts of the news media.

Genres: Linguistics

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Teun Adrianus van Dijk, is a scholar in the fields of text linguistics, discourse analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis. With Walter Kintsch he contributed to the development of the psychology of text processing.