KEY POINTS

• Contradictory perceptual boundaries create the clash between the news media and the public: perceptions are developed by ongoing, shared group experiences. A reporter reads the paper differently than you do, and sees partitions in the text and presentation that you do not.

• The shape or content of media discourse is influenced by context (local and professional), structure (how news is gathered and assembled), and interaction (of practitioners and a community of readers or listeners).

• An interactional and ethnographic approach allows us to study the process of news production, the practice of journalists, and their relationships internally (profession or in-group) and externally (audience or out-group).

• Constraints of different orders work simultaneously to influence practice: technical, textual, relational, and sociopolitical (i.e., technology, text, audience, and ideology).

This book looks at media language through an examination of the news media as a community of practitioners, whose actions reinforce its professional identity, as well as result in the news stories we as the public read, hear, click to, digest, consume, ignore, appreciate, vilify, or rail against. The McLuhanesque meaning of the (print, broadcast, Web) “medium and the message” exists because of language, as well as other cultural indexes and inferences, more about which will be said throughout the book.

The value of linguistic approaches to the analysis of news media communicative actions has the net goal of understanding news language at all levels, and allows for a comprehensiveness of understanding of media outputs, or news discourse.