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616 Media, Politics, and Discourse: Interactions Mattelart A (1999). Kommunikation ohne Grenzen? Geschichte der Ideen und Strategien globaler Vernetzung. Rodenbach: Avinus Verlag. McQuail D (1987). Mass communication theory: an introduction. London: Sage. Morley D (2000). Home territories. Media, mobility and identity. London: Routledge. Robins K (ed.) (1997). Programming for people. From cultural rights to cultural responsibilities. United Nations World Television Forum. New York, 1997. Geneva: European Broadcasting Union. ¨ konomiSiegert G (2003). ‘Im Zentrum des Taifuns: Die O sierung als treibende Kraft des medialen Wandels?’ Medien Journal 1, 20–31. Todorov T (1984). Mikhail Bakhtin. The dialogic principle. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Van Leeuwen T & Wodak R (1999). ‘Legitimizing immigration control: a discourse-historical analysis.’ Discourse Studies 1(1), 83–118. Wodak R (2000). ‘Recontextualization and the transformation of meanings: a critical discourse analysis of decision making in EU meetings about employment policies.’ In Sarangi S & Coulthard M (eds.) Discourse and social life. London: Longman. 185–206. Wodak R & Busch B (2004). ‘Approaches to media texts.’ In Downing J, McQuail D, Schlesinger P & Wartella E (eds.) Handbook of media studies. London: Sage. 105–123. Young I M (1987). ‘Impartiality and the civic public.’ In Cornell D & Benhabib S (eds.) Feminism as a critique. Cambridge: Polity Press. 56–76.

Media: Analysis and Methods J Thornborrow, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction The media provide a vast, continuous, and increasingly varied supply of linguistic data. The analytic methods which have been used to examine and explain these data are correspondingly diverse. From the early days of terrestrial television, with limited broadcasting hours, we have moved to 24-hour, multiple-channel satellite and digital broadcasting; radio stations on FM supply a wide choice of local and national programs; the Web has provided a whole new mode of electronic communication, including new ways of accessing print journalism, as most newspapers now publish on the Internet as well as in newsprint. ‘Interactive’ has become the digital buzzword for 21st-century media, as audiences of all kinds, readers, listeners, viewers, are invited to participate by phoning, e-mailing, texting (SMS messaging), joining bulletin boards and internet discussion groups. The ‘voice’ of the public is now as much a part of media discourse as the voice of the newscaster or commentator. How has this proliferation of communicative data been approached by discourse analysts and linguists? What kind of media texts have been the focus of analysis and what kind of questions do we ask about such texts? This article presents some of the main analytic approaches to media discourse over the last two decades, and gives a summary of the concepts and issues that have been most salient in this work. The first section concentrates on aspects

of participation: work dealing with analyses of speaker roles, voices, and identity in media discourse. The second section outlines aspects of content, dealing with work which has focused on how the media construct and represent the world. The final section addresses the particular characteristics of selected media genres, summarizing those aspects of media discourse which have been considered as context specific, institutionally oriented, and, as such, analyzably different from other forms of text and talk.

Analyzing Participation in Media Discourse A major concept within interactional sociolinguistics, based around Goffman’s notion of participation frameworks and ‘footing’ (Goffman, 1981), is the complex relationship between speakers, hearers, and the context of utterance. Goffman challenges the ‘speaker/hearer’ conduit models of communication and shows how these two categories can be described in far more contextually sensitive terms. Participation Frameworks and Footings

Linguistic analyses of media discourse have drawn heavily on Goffman’s work, particularly in relation to the discourse of public participation broadcasting (talk shows, radio phone-ins, panel debates, etc.), where members of the public interact with media professionals and other institutional representatives. These programs set up particular configurations of participant roles that are institutionally determined and generically specific. So, for example, in a British TV current affairs panel debate such as the BBC’s

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Question Time, the host, the members of the panel, and the audience occupy different participant roles as the program unfolds. All are ‘ratified participants’ in the communicative event, but the relationship between their position as speaker or hearer, addresser or addressee, is both complex and shifting. In his analysis of indirectly targeted utterances in this TV panel discussion, Levinson (1988: 221) pointed out that ‘‘having a set of participant role categories is one thing, but working out who stands in which when can be quite another, on a vastly greater plane of complexity.’’ A microanalytic account which addresses this complex relationship in mediated interaction is Hutchby’s (1999) analysis of frame attunement and footing in talk radio phone-in call openings. Starting from Goffman’s notion of ‘mutually ratified participation’ in situated interactions, Hutchby described how callers move from a state of ‘incipient’ speakership to actual speakership and topic initiation in the first three seconds of these, usually routine, opening sequences, such as the following: Host: Joan calling from Clapham now. Good morning. Caller: Good morning Brian. Erm:, I (li) I also agree that the . . . (Hutchby, 1999: 46)

He argues that the sequential organization of the call opening (i.e., host goes first, caller goes second, with a specialized distribution of turn types; see ‘Media Talk as ‘‘Specialized’’ Speech Exchange Systems’ below) is only partly how institutionality is achieved in this context. Temporality is also crucial here; Hutchby identifies the moment-by-moment shifts of footing hosts and callers move through (i.e., the greeting, ‘buffer’ [erm], and topic initiation) in order to effect a transition from the private sphere of the caller into the public sphere of the broadcast. In addition to providing a set of categories and a description of the range of participant roles in a TV or radio broadcast, the analysis of participant roles and turn-taking positions in these programs enables us to examine the relationship between the institutional and the communicative context for talk. An analysis of the participation framework also enables us to examine typically who does what in those roles, i.e., the type of turns taken by each participant. As an illustration, a popular radio phone-in format will typically involve a host, a studio guest, and a caller (as well as the wider listening audience). In their institutional roles, these participants do different things: the role of the host is to mediate interaction between caller and guest, while the caller asks the questions and the guest gives the answers. However, although the caller occupies the potentially powerful role of questioner, their right of reply is not given in

this context; the third-turn receipt of the answer is generally taken by the host, who may or may not offer a further turn to the caller. This third turn is a host’s resource for controlling the trajectory of the talk (Thornborrow, 2002). Participation and Identity in Public Participation Broadcasting

Often linked to the analysis of speaker roles, another analytic concept used to examine participation in media discourse is the use of the categories ‘expert’ and ‘lay.’ These terms describe the institutional and social status of participants, and have a bearing on the kind of talk that they will be invited to produce. In a discussion of the participation framework in Kilroy, a former British TV talk show, Livingstone and Lunt described the difference between expert and lay discourse. Talk by lay audience members is real, authentic, grounded in experience, ‘hot’; while expert talk is ‘cold’: artificial, fragmented, and ungrounded (Livingstone and Lunt, 1994: 102). Experts speak for others, while the audience speak for themselves. Again, using Goffman’s model of ‘footing’ to describe the relationship of a speaker to their utterance, it was claimed that a lay participant speaks from a position of ‘animator, author and principal,’ in their own voice, in their own words, with commitment to what they say, while experts talk as animator rather than author or principal, speaking with an institutional voice, for ‘the profession’ and not from personal experience or commitment. The theme of authenticity, and what is meant by an authentic voice in media discourse, has been taken up in Thornborrow and van Leeuwen (2001). Another way of thinking about the expert/lay dichotomy in public participation broadcasting is to look at how speakers identify themselves in this context. While some participants in these programs are identified by name and by their institutional relevance to the topic at hand by the host, so-called lay participants have to do this work for themselves. Callers to radio phone-ins, and participants in talk show debates, routinely construct a relevant situated identity in relation to what they have to say: Caller: hello yes uh my question uh to the prime minister is on health .hh I’m a nurse in (.) a London teaching hospital and (.) my question is this [–] (Thornborrow, 2001b: 464)

This process of ‘discursive grounding’ provides a relevant frame for their contribution to the talk. A similar kind of action can be found in the way callers legitimize their opinions and viewpoints through a process Hutchby (2001: 495) called ‘witnessing’: ‘‘they bring into play claims that are – or are

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assumed to be – incontrovertible, such as being a member of the category of pensioners, or having seen an event with one’s own eyes.’’ Participation and Identity on the Net

The question of participant identity is also one that has been explored in relation to computer-mediated communication (CMC), where participation frameworks are configured differently again from broadcast radio or television media genres. It has been suggested that one of the primary features of Webbased communication is the option not to reveal aspects of one’s social identity. It is possible to conceal age, gender, ethnic background, and class – the traditional sociolinguistic ‘big four’ variables – and construct a persona which is free from visual or spoken identity markers. The advantages of Web-based communication have been studied from the perspective of people who suffer from some kind of impediment or disability in face-to-face, or voice-to-voice, communicative situations, and for whom interaction is facilitated through the written modes of e-mail and messaging (cf. Lupton, 2002). However, the construction of a virtual identity can clearly have negative effects when used to intentionally deceive others. In spite of the initial view that the Internet was going to release users from conventional social hierarchies and prejudices, research has shown that in CMC, people still make assumptions about who they are communicating with based on stereotypical interpretations of gendered behavior (cf. Deuel, 1996).

Analyzing Representation and Ideology in Media Discourse Turning from participation in mediated interaction to the subject matter of media discourse, the analysis of content – particularly of print and broadcast news – was the focus of research in media studies begun in the mid-1970s by a group known as the Glasgow Media Group (1976, 1980). This concern with content as ideological representation was also taken up from a linguistic perspective in the development of a body of work known as ‘critical linguistics’ (cf. Kress and Hodge, 1976). Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis

In terms of media analysis, critical linguists began to look in detail at the linguistic structures in news reporting, particularly at the processes of grammatical and lexical selection and representation. Basing their claim on what has been described as a ‘weak version’ of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, they argued

that ideological positions can to some degree be ‘read off’ from linguistic form. Linguistic processes such as transitivity, nominalization, and passivization realized as systematic textual choices present different ideological versions, or theories, of the world, and of events, actors, and actions in it (Fowler, 1991; Simpson, 1993). Driven to some extent by the political context at that time (in Britain this was characterized by monetarist economics, industrial unrest, and, as in the United States, hard-line nuclear defense policies), this work was developed in order to challenge and critique the dominant ideologies of Thatcherism and Reaganism in a range of textual genres, from media news reports to political speeches and policy documents (Chilton, 1988; Fairclough, 1995). Montgomery’s (1996) analysis of the news reports of the British coal miners’ strike in 1983 showed how contrasting representations of what is ostensibly the same event can be produced through different selections of linguistic forms. Key theories which have been elaborated by Norman Fairclough within the field of critical discourse analysis (CDA) are ‘synthetic personalization’ and the ‘marketization’ of discourse, the ‘commodification’ of social institutional processes such as education, and the ‘mediatization’ of politics and government. With the change in the political agenda brought about by the election of a Labour government in Britain in 1997, Fairclough (2000) turned the spotlight on the language of Tony Blair’s New Labour, analyzing the rhetorical construction of political spin: the control over the way politicians use language to communicate their ideas through the media. The agenda of CDA, as it has been set out by Norman Fairclough (1995), Teun van Dijk (1988), and their colleagues across Europe over the last 10 to 15 years (Wodak and Meyer, 2002), is to provide a set of critical tools and analytic methods with which to challenge and critique ideological discourse practices. Examples of this approach as it is applied to media texts can be found in van Dijk’s analysis of racist discourse in the press (1991) and in Ruth Wodak’s research into attitudes towards immigration, racism, and the European Union. Gunter Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (1998) also take a critical approach to media texts in their work on the semiotics of newspaper layouts. This is an analytic approach which takes into account the organization of not just the verbal, but also the visual aspects of mediated communication, and offers a multimodal analysis of the components implicated in the production of textual meanings. The theoretical grounding of CDA and its methods are not without critics. There can be a tendency to

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overtheorize at the expense of paying close attention to empirical data, and a proliferation of technical terms that are not always clearly defined. As a methodological ‘toolkit’ for the analysis of media (or indeed other) texts, however, one of the clearest and most systematic accounts of the application of CDA to media texts can be found in van Dijk (1998). Here he laid out a set of analytic parameters (social functions, cognitive structures, and discursive expression and reproduction) and summarized the relationship between them, demonstrating how they can be used to unpack the ideologies which organize social attitudes and opinions in news stories. Despite these criticisms, it is clear that what versions of discourse analysis taking a sociocritical approach to textual data can convincingly do is show the kind of underlying background assumptions and prevailing discourses which structure hegemonic social meanings in texts. As an example, Justine Coupland’s work on the representation of social groups in a range of advertising texts from dating ads to face cream ads focuses on the social construction of age and identity. Coupland uses the concept of commodification of the self to analyze the discourse of dating adverts (1996) and more recently, to analyze the ideological discourse practices involved in advertising skin care products (2003), i.e., the presupposition in that ageing is problematic. CDA has established itself as one of the principal methods for analyzing and critically evaluating the content of media discourse broadly understood, whether in spoken mode (see Fairclough, 1995, for analyses of popular television series in Britain such as Crimewatch UK or Medicine Now) or in the print media, from advertising to newspaper reporting.

Analyzing Generic Properties of Media Texts The analysis of representational aspects of media discourse as outlined above is only part of the story. The analysis of media discourse as a particular form of talk has been the subject of a wide spectrum of research, which has focused on unscripted, broadcast talk. This is first and foremost ‘public’ talk (Scannell, 1991), since one of the most significant ways in which media talk differs from talk in many other nonmediated contexts is the fact that it is produced for an audience that is not copresent (often termed ‘the overhearing audience’). Most of the major analytic work which focuses on mediated talk as interaction has been undertaken in the field of conversation analysis (CA).

Media Talk as ‘Specialized’ Speech Exchange Systems

From the perspective of CA, the media have provided a highly fruitful source of institutional data. Examining mediated interaction as a context for talk which has a restricted and preallocated turn-taking system, and a specialized distribution of turn types, conversation analysts have been able to describe the organization of talk in media genres such as news interviews and public participation programs on both radio and television. The turn-taking system of a news interview is ‘‘a course of interaction’’ (Clayman and Heritage, 2002: 13) designed to maintain the audience as addressee. Specifically, news interview openings set agendas and regulate interviewees’ access to interaction, while closings are managed to limit abruptness within strict time limits. The turn-taking process involves one party asking questions (the interviewer) and the other responding to them (the interviewee); furthermore, it always falls to the interviewer to respond to an answer in third-turn receipt position, which enables them to do things such as reformulate an answer either positively, negatively, or aggressively. This speech exchange system is very different from conversational turn taking, where there is no preallocation of speakers or specialized distribution of turns. Issues of agenda setting, agenda shifting, and neutrality in news interviews have also been addressed by conversation analysts: for example, the design of interviewer questions, and the various strategies deployed by interviewees in answering (or not answering) the question. Clayman and Heritage pointed out that interviewers ‘‘often work to place some degree of distance between themselves and their more overtly opinionated remarks’’ (2002: 152) and the most usual way of doing this is by attributing that point of view to a third party, as in the following example: IR: .hhh People have used the phrase ‘concentration camps’: and the Bosnians themselves have used that phrase. Do you believe there’s any justification for that at all? (Clayman and Heritage, 2002: 153)

Neutrality is jointly produced by both interviewer and interviewee, and interviewees collaborate in maintaining the neutralistic stance by not challenging third-party assertions, although as Clayman and Heritage pointed out, they generally tend to refute them. Current styles of adversarial interviewing, and the increase of debate interviews where multiple interviewees take part in the interaction, usually with the intention of providing institutional

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‘balance,’ are now also beginning to be investigated by conversation analysts as the genre changes and evolves. It is not only the turn sequences of questions and answers in news interviews that have been shown to be contextually specific. This is also the case in other broadcasts such radio phone-in programs, where callers can engage in various kinds of questioning activity. An example of how mediated interaction can be seen to differ from conversational interaction can be found in Hutchby’s (1995) analysis of the design of advice-giving turns in a radio phone-in program. In this context again, listeners have to be maintained as ratified participants in the talk event, as well as the host, expert adviser, and callers. The advice giver manages this by moving from the particular to the general, addressing not only the current caller with the problem, but all listeners who may also have the same problem, thus making their advice relevant for not just one addressee but for their wider audience. The design of talk for this ‘overhearing audience’ has been one of the central concepts in conversationanalytic approaches to media discourse, and it has also been taken up more generally by discourse analysts interested in the particular, public, nature of broadcast talk. Media Talk as ‘Performance’

Drawing on the notion that mediated communication is public talk produced for the listening and viewing audience, a body of work has emerged which analyzes media discourse as ‘performance.’ With specific reference to television talk shows, Tolson (2001b) examined the ways in which interaction in these programs is ‘doubly articulated,’ i.e., designed for its immediate recipients as well as the studio and/or viewing audience. Focusing on discourse genres such as conflict talk, argument, narrative, and therapy talk, which characterize many TV talk shows, these studies show how unscripted talk produced in such contexts is nevertheless performed for its audience. And such talk can be considered as ‘‘a form of play with pragmatic expectations of conversational practice’’ (Tolson, 2001a). For instance, Myers (2001) examined how a topic is made into an issue on the Jerry Springer show through four distinct stages: defining and representing stances, making those stances controversial, making them dramatic, then finally, making them meaningful. Wood (2001) looked at how Kilroy (former host of a British talk show of the same name) pursues an agenda through particular types of question and answer sequences which maximize conflict and enhance levels of ‘televisuality.’ She argued that in these shows it is not simply a case

of lay speakers being given a voice in the sense that ordinary people are invited to talk about their everyday lifeworlds; rather that the talk is constructed and managed in order to produce debate and dissent – i.e., the pursuit and performance of conflict. Similarly, Thornborrow (2001b) showed how narrative discourse of lay participants is elicited and managed in order to maximize the most dramatic moments of a story for the audience, examining the role of the host as narrative dramatizer as well as narrative elicitor. Media Discourse Genres: Some Examples

The fact that mediated communication gives rise to highly context specific genres of discourse has also been addressed by sociolinguists interested in describing forms of talk generated by broadcasting institutions, from DJ talk to sports commentary. Many of these media discourse genres have highly distinctive linguistic and pragmatic features, not only in terms of their content, but also in terms of their register, modes of address, and deictic format. DJ Radio Talk In a seminal paper on DJ talk, following Goffman (1981), Montgomery (1986) produced a further challenge to the model of mass communication which understands the communicative event in terms of a single speaker addressing a mass audience. Basing his analysis on pragmatic concepts of deixis and speech act theory, Montgomery showed how monologic DJ talk foregrounds an interpersonal relationship between the DJ and his audience, continually shifting its mode of address between different constituencies in the listening audience. Interpersonal features of DJ talk include simulating copresence through the linguistic devices of social and spatial deixis, the use of speech acts that require responses, e.g., questions and directives, and the use of expressives, e.g., congratulation and commiseration. Montgomery also drew on Goffman’s concept of participation frameworks and footing in order to examine alignments between speaker (DJ) and an array of hearers, through a process of interpolation, e.g.: Okay Fleet Street (they’re all awake now) I have news of a rock star (Montgomery, 1986: 437)

In this way, Radio DJs constantly realign their talk to address different segments of the audience, from the individual to the collective, but very rarely to the general mass. Mediated Narratives Narrative discourse is pervasive in broadcasting. In addition to the fictional genres of film, drama, soap, and sitcom, contexts for

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storytelling include news, documentary, TV talk shows and talk radio, broadcasting, and, most recently, reality TV. An early account of how private stories are produced as public discourse is Montgomery’s study of narrative discourse on a popular British radio station. In his analysis of ‘Our Tune,’ a regular slot through the 1970s and 80s which featured listeners’ stories of overcoming personal difficulties in their lives, Montgomery used a Labovian framework of oral narrative analysis to show how different components of the stories become adapted to this particular mediated event. The DJ becomes the ‘epistolary narrator’ transforming the story from its original form of a private letter to the public medium of the spoken word. Through the use of ‘empathetic orientation’ towards the story protagonists, and specialized evaluation clauses that Montgomery calls ‘generic maxims,’ the DJ reconfigures the relationship between the teller, the story, and its recipients for its new, broadcast context (Montgomery, 1991). More recently, the design features and discourse structure of storytelling by lay participants on British and American talk shows have been examined from a range of analytical perspectives (cf. Thornborrow, 1997, 2001b; Lorenzo-Dus, 2003). Drawing on CA, as well as the pragmatics of facework, Goffman’s concept of role relations, and Gidden’s notion of the ‘project of the self,’ this work examines aspects of situated narrative form as well as its contextual function as a component of public participation broadcasting. Telling stories becomes a quasitherapeutic act, what Lorenzo Dus called ‘emotional DIY,’ conducted in the public domain. Live Commentary Relaying live events to a listening or TV viewing audience has become one of the primary functions of public broadcasting. The language of radio and television commentary, from sporting events to state ceremonies, is distinctive in its form, and linguistically particularly interesting as a media discourse genre. As Stephanie Marriott (1997: 194–195) explained, the commentator is ‘‘perpetually poised on the edge of the new,’’ and commentary constructs a shared ‘‘emergent present’’ between speakers and recipients. For radio, this involves a shared temporal framework, and in the case of television, also a shared spatial perspective: the visual field of the television monitor in the studio and the television screen of the viewer. This intersubjectivity between commentator and viewer is created linguistically through a high instance of deictic expressions which enforce the mutual, shared experience of the here and now, of first- and second-person pronouns which foreground the interpersonal relationship between speaker and hearer, of hedged opinions which

allow for the uncertainty of the moment, and of present and present perfect tenses which locate events in the ‘now’ and the ‘just now.’ Here are some examples from a bowls match commentary, and a snooker game: 1. Well, Mervyn, if he can make contact with his own nearest blue bowl and punch out the nearest McMahon bowl, could establish a set and match winning lie – he’s running after it – he rather likes it – he’s thereabouts – he’s got it. 2. I promise you the pressure has got to be the greatest ever. 3. Well that’s worked out exceptionally well for Steve. (Marriott, 1997: 194)

‘Netspeak,’ E-mails, and SMS Messaging To conclude this selection of linguistic analyses of media genres, no account would be complete without a brief comment on the most recent phenomena of the electronic age of communication, the Internet and the cell phone. These media not only give rise to different participation frameworks for communication (see above) but also, it is claimed, to new forms of written language. David Crystal (2001) examined some of the changes that the new medium of the Internet has brought about, e.g., neologisms, new conventions in formatting and punctuation, and the use of graphic symbols (emoticons) as expressive and evaluative discourse markers. Crystal takes the view that language is not only changing on the Internet, but it is changing because of the Internet. Others are more cautious in their claims, asking whether language use on the Internet is really so different from other varieties and registers to merit a label of its own. However, a consensus seems to be developing that ‘netspeak’ or ‘netlingo’ is at the very least a form of written communication that shares some characteristics with spoken language, and these characteristics can be contextually identified and linguistically described. E-mail communication has been described both as ‘‘letters by phone’’ and as ‘‘speech by other means’’ (Baron, 2003), capturing the difficulty of pinning down precisely what is distinctive about this form of communication. The language style is informal (but not as informal as face-to-face speech), a fast response is expected (but doesn’t always get acknowledged), an e-mail is generally intended for a limited audience (but leaves a trace and can be forwarded to others without the sender’s knowledge), and it is often treated as ephemeral: unedited and with the production errors left in (but it can be printed out, edited, and traced). The synchronous (real time) interaction that takes place in online chatrooms, with instant messaging, or in multiple user dialogs can be as complex as

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multiparty talk: it is characterized by a high level of ‘addressivity,’ short turns, different conversational strands running simultaneously, and back channel support/minimal response tokens (Thurlow et al., 2003) While this form of communication is immediate, sharing many features of face-to-face interaction, it nevertheless relies on the use of the keyboard. The need for interactional speed leads to the development of specialized forms such as letter homophones, acronyms, and hybrids of both, capitalization for stress and emphasis, stylized spelling, and the use of emoticons and other graphic symbols which form a code, a linguistic variety used in this specialized context, which, like all mediated interaction, is constantly evolving. See also: Documentary; Language in Computer-Mediated Communication; Media and Language: Overview; Media and Marginalized Groups; Media Panics; News Language; Radio: Language; Sports Broadcasting; Television: Language.

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Media: Pragmatics K C Schrøder, Roskilde University, Denmark ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Today, many, if not most, people in the world live in societies that can be described as ‘mediatized societies.’ A mediatized society is one in which the meaning processes, or discourses, provided by the communication media play an increasing, even overwhelming, role in the way society is economically, politically, and culturally organized, affecting the way we as individuals and groups think about everything and thus what we do in all contexts of life. The mediatized society affects us in whatever social roles we have to fill in everyday life. As citizens, we are concerned about the organization and power relations of society; as consumers, we have to take care of our material, intellectual, and wider cultural needs; and as human beings, we have to organize our private lives as individuals, couples, or families on a daily, weekly, and yearly basis. In all these respects, we are surrounded and affected by the sea of discursive meanings produced by the media. It is therefore mandatory for the understanding of modern society to understand the complex

social meaning processes that have media at their core. This requires a ‘pragmatics of media’ that explores media discourses in their situational and social contexts.

Approaches to the Study of Media Discourses It has gradually become accepted, at least in principle, that in order to understand the workings of the mediatized society it is necessary to adopt a holistic perspective of the media, according to which it is necessary to not just analyze the media texts but also to consider the production and reception processes involved in media texts, as well as the macrosocial context, as interdependent objects of empirical analysis. For a number of years, these processes were conceptualized theoretically in semiotic terms as a signifying process, along the lines laid down by the so-called ‘encoding/decoding’ model of mass communication (Hall, 1980) (Figure 1). This model implies that any study of a media genre or of the media coverage of real-world events must research, in addition to the textual aspects, the production and reception stages around the text. The

Figure 1 The encoding/decoding model. Reproduced from Hall S (1980). ‘Encoding/decoding’ In Hall S, Hobson D, Lowe A & Willis P (eds.) Culture, media, language. London: Hutchinson.