[Teun A van Dijk] News As Discourse(BookZZ org) pdf

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. Where￾as in much mass communication research, the economic, social, or cultural
dimensions of news and news media are addressed, the present study em￾phasizes the importance of an explicit structural analysis of news reports.
Such an analysis should provide a qualitative alternative to traditional meth￾ods of content analysis. Also, attention is paid to processes of news produc￾tion 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 newsmaking and,
indirectly, to the institutional and macrosociological contexts of the news
media.
After a survey, in Chapter 1, of recent studies of news in different
disciplines, both in the United States and Europe, Chapter 2 discusses the
respective levels and dimensions of the structures of news reports in the
press. Besides the usual linguistic, grammatical analysis of news language,
an account is given of the important notions of topic and news schema,
which represent the overall content and the conventional form of news
reports. Finally, stylistic and rhetorical structures of news are analyzed. It is
shown that these various structures of the news are systematically related to
viiviii PREFACE
the cognitive and social conditions of news production, as well as to the
processes of understanding by the readers. At several levels, the ideological
dimensions of news structures are being analyzed.
Chapters 3 and 4 feature the more empirical, cognitive, and social psy￾chological app,roach to news production and reception. They report results
of field studies on everyday news production as source text processing by
journalists and on recall of news stories by readers. Their theoretical basis
derives from current advances in text processing within cognitive psychol￾ogy and Artificial Intelligence. At the same time, however, the processes of
production and understanding news have an important social dimension, so
that they should be accounted for in terms of social cognitions of news￾makers and readers. This also allows the integration of our account into a
sociological analysis of news and news media.
This book should be of interest for students and researchers in the fields
of mass communication, discourse analysis, linguistics, and cognitive and
social psychology. To facilitate comprehension for readers from different
disciplines, these chapters also feature an introduction to the respective
theoretical notions used in the analysis of news structures and processes.
Originally, this book was planned as part of a larger study, which also
included applications and case studies on reporting in the world's press (the
coverage of the assassination of Bechir Gemayel of Lebanon in September
1982) as well as studies on the portrayal of ethnic minority groups and
squatters in the news. Since such a book would have become too volu￾minous, it was decided to publish the case studies as a separate book, News
Analysis, which may be read as a companion volume to the present study,
and which is also published in this series. Both books summarize the result
of work on news I have been engaged in since the end of the 1970s.
The field studies reported in this book were carried out with the as￾sistance by the following students of the University of Amsterdam: Sjoukje
de Bie, Juliette de Bruin, Hellen Claver, Jane Alice Coerts, Gemma Derk￾sen, Barbara Diddens, Jeroen Fabius, Guns Gillard d'Arcy, Michel Gij￾selhart, Karin Greep, Jose Hermans, Dienke Hondius, Kitty Jansman, Nico
de Klerk, Liesbeth Klumper, Rie Kromhout, Stan Liebrand, Anja Lok,
Marianne Louwes, Ingeborg van Oosterom, Hans Pols, Anke Riem, Patrice
Riemens, and Tij1 Rood. I would like to thank them all for their contribu￾tions and their enthusiasm. I am also indebted to Piet de Geus for his
assistance with the usual computer chores related to present-day scholarly
work. Finally, I would like to thank Jennings Bryant for his fast and positive
advice to publish this hook in this series.
Tenn A. van DijkTHE ST