LZ411 – Critical Media theory

News discourse and newspaper meanings

Aims today …•To introduce Stuart Hall’s ‘encoding and decoding’ model for media communication

•To look at the specifics of news(paper) discourse in terms of encoding and decoding

Today’s view on news

"The Media do not simply and transparently report events which are 'naturally' newsworthy in themselves. 'News' is the end-product of a complex process which begins with a systematic sorting and selecting of events and topics acccording to a socially constructed set of categories" (Hall et al. 1978:53 )

“Many critical researchers argue that news accounts encourage us to accept as natural, obvious or commonsensical certain preferred ways of classifying reality, and that these classifications have far-reaching implications for the cultural reproduction of power relations across society” (Allan 1999:87)

What we call ‘news’ is actually conventionalised social constructions of events happening in the world.

The discursive practices of print journalism

• What are the ways that meanings are structured in the circuit of communication?

Stuart Hall Cultural Theorist

Production of news texts

circulation

Consumption of news textsreproduction

Encoding-Decoding model

The circuit of news communication

ProductionCultural ‘encoding’

Circulation

Consumption

Reproduction

The newspaper story as ‘meaningful discourse’

Cultural ‘decoding’

Knowledge of the newspaper

Knowledge of the way news works

Raw material - the natural world

(un-organised, non-discursive

event)

Social knowledge ‘maps of meaning’ in the ‘reception

context’

Productionknowledge

Cultural meanings

Social knowledge ‘maps of meaning’ in the production

context

‘Encoding’

1. Selection criteria which can distinguish between ‘an event’ and ‘news’.

2. The material practices underpinning such selection (costs, bureaucratic organisation, political commitments, access and sources etc.)

3. Construction of the texts: language use, ‘voice’, form, layout, understanding of audience etc.

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What are the material and discursive practices of news production?

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News values (Galtung &Ruge 1965)

1) Frequency2) Amplitude 3) Unambiguity4) Meaningfulness5) Predictability6) Surprise

7) Correspondence8) Composition9) Elite nations10) Elite people11) Personification12) Negativity

Examples to consider

• Front pages of Guardian, The Daily Mirror, The Sun and The Daily Telegraph from today

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Lecture summaryHall et al.’s (1978) model of encoding and decoding

as a semiotic analysis of news language.

News as a social process consisting of: 1) Selection 2) Access and Sources and 3) Text construction.

Ideological impact of such processes – news as representation of ‘a social consensus view’ of the world. Whose consensus?!

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Seminars: Analysis tasks(Note: the readings are different from the

reader!

1) Analysing discourse features (the public idiom) of newspapers

from Fowler (1991)

2) Analysing the narrative structure of ‘hard’ news stories.

from Allan (2004)

Overall aim: to show how what we call ‘news’ is actually conventionalised social constructions of events happening in the world.