Blackwell Reference Online

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“News as discourse” marks a theoretical framework for the analysis of news. News is considered as a complex communicative event – as discourse – including the social context of news reports (→  Discourse ; Political Discourse ). Rather than exclusively focusing on text properties such as the thematic structure of news reports, the actors, and the opinions addressed in the reports, the framework directs attention to the participants, the production, and the reception processes, as well as to the possible effects. “News as discourse” starts from the assumption that texts are a “result of social and professional routines of journalists in institutional settings, on the one hand, and an important condition for the effective cognitive processing of news texts by both journalists and readers, on the other hand” ( van Dijk 1985 , 70). Investigating text and context, the approach aims to assess the systematic relationship between the two. The theoretical framework of news as discourse differs from more traditional approaches to news analysis by its holistic perspective. It integrates findings from linguistics, cognitive and social psychology, speech communication, micro-sociology, and ethnography. The methodological basis of the framework is referred to as →  discourse analysis. It mainly draws on linguistic and →  information processing approaches in order to reconstruct the meaning ... log in or subscribe to read full text