The media
Anne O’Keeffe

Historical overview of media discourse
‘The media’ is a very broad term, encompassing print and broadcast genres, that is anything from newspaper to chat show and, latterly, much more besides, as new media emerge in line with technological leaps. The study of ‘the media’ comes under the remit of media studies from perspectives such as their production and consumption, as well as their aesthetic form.
The academic area of media studies cuts across a number of disciplines including communication, sociology, political science, cultural studies, philosophy and rhetoric, to name but a handful. Meanwhile, the object of study, ‘the media’, is an ever-changing and ever-growing entity. The study of ‘the media’ also comes under the radar of applied linguistics because at the core of these media is language, communication and the making of meaning, which is obviously of great interest to linguists. As Fairclough (1995a: 2) points out, the substantively linguistic and discoursal nature of the power of the media is a strong argument for analysing the mass media linguistically.
Central to the connection between media studies and studies of the language used in the media (media discourse studies) is the importance placed on ideology. A major force behind the study of ideology in the media is Stuart Hall (see, for example, Hall 1973, 1977, 1980,
1982). Hall (1982), in his influential paper, notes that the study of media (or ‘mass communication’) has had a chequered past. He charts its early years from the 1940s to the 1960s as being dominated by what he terms sociological approaches of ‘mainstream’ American behavioural science (Hall’s emphasis). From the 1960s began the emergence of an alternative paradigm, a ‘critical’ one. In looking at ideology in the media, one is essentially taking a critical stance. As Hall puts it, ‘the simplest way to characterise the shift from “mainstream” to
“critical” perspectives is in terms of the movement from, essentially, a behavioural to an ideological perspective’ (1982: 1).
An interesting example of a behaviourist-type study of the media is Horton and Wohl
([1956] 1979). Horton and Wohl were among the first to write about the way the media and media performers create the illusion of an interpersonal relationship between them and their audience. The concept of mediated (pseudo-)relations obviously has enormous relevance for the study of media discourse today in all its forms. Horton and Wohl referred to it as a
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‘para-social’ relationship because it is based on an implicit agreement between the ‘performer’ and the audience that they will pretend the relationship is not mediated and is carried on as though it were face-to-face. In their study of the television chat show The Johnny Carson Show audiences, Horton and Wohl found that many viewers, in 1950s America, claimed that they
‘knew’ Johnny Carson better than their next-door neighbour. They also note the emergence of
(marked words as in original): a new type of performer: quiz-masters, announcers, ‘interviewers’ in a new ‘show-business’ world – in brief, a special category of ‘personalities’ whose existence is a function of the media themselves. These ‘personalities’ usually, are not prominent in any of the social spheres beyond the media. They exist for their audiences only in the para-social relation.
(Horton and Wohl [1956] 1979: 186)
This early study still has resonance for the study of media discourse today in that our relationship with media personae has, if anything, grown and deepened, compared with the days of Johnny Carson, and this is very much linked to how we use language in the creation, expression and maintenance of pseudo-intimate relationships (see O’Keeffe 2006).
Ideology has also had a major impact on the study of language in the media. O’Halloran
(2010) explains that ideology is about looking at representations of aspects of the world which contribute to establishing and maintaining social relations of domination, inequality and exploitation. White (1997), for example, claims that by ‘severely’ circumscribing subjective interpersonal features in hard news reports, journalists can, through ‘objective’ language, purport to be neutral, essentially where formal language provides the veneer of neutrality. The dominant methodology which addresses this within media discourse studies is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which we shall discuss further below. Van Dijk (2001: 352) offers the following definition of CDA:
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context. With such dissident research, critical discourse analysts take an explicit position, and thus want to understand, expose, and ultimately resist social inequality.
(Van Dijk 2001: 352)
In a later publication, van Dijk (2009), opting to use the term Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), brings further clarity to the notion of a critical approach to discourse studies in general, stating that it characterizes the orientation of the researcher rather than their method. CDS scholars are sociopolitically committed to social equality and justice, he explains. This comes through in their research ‘by the formulation of specific goals, the selection and construction of theories, the use and development of methods of analysis and especially in the application of such research in the study of important social problems and political issues’ (van Dijk 2009: 63). Critical scholars are interested in the way ‘discourse (re)produces social domination, that is the power abuse of one group over others, and how dominated groups may discursively resist that abuse’ (ibid.). Van Dijk observes that critical studies of discourse are problem-led rather than discipline- or theory-oriented.
Obvious examples of problems which relate to abuses of power and injustice are in relation to gender, race and class. As we will further discuss below (in the second and third sections), looking at ideological issues, or taking a critical stance, in relation to the study of media discourse, has proven to be very important to our understanding as consumers of mass media.
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While CDA takes an ideological or critical stance in its approach to media discourse, other methodologies offer descriptive insights at the level of discourse and interaction. From the
American tradition comes Conversation Analysis (CA), an approach which has its origins in ethnomethodology, a branch of sociology. In stark contrast to CDA, it is ‘essentially grounded in surface data, without theoretical assumptions’ (Lesser 2003). The area of Corpus Linguistics (CL), a relatively established area in its own right, is increasingly emerging in the study of language in the media (e.g. O’Keeffe 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006; Chang 2002; O’Halloran 2010).
While CL can be purely descriptive and ideology-neutral, it can also work very well in tandem with critical approaches (see O’Halloran 2010, and O’Halloran, this volume). The added value of corpus linguistics in the study of media discourse is its ability to look at large amounts of media material (both written or spoken). Also, it allows researchers to make both qualitative and quantitative statements about the data.

Written versus spoken media discourse studies
Much study of language and the media over the years has focused on the written genres, particularly newspapers. This is largely because they are more readily available for analysis by virtue of being in written form compared with the ephemerality of spoken media discourse, which has to be recorded and then transcribed. The ease of recording and storage afforded by digital technology now means that there is much more scope for studies of spoken media discourse.
However, the drudge of accurate transcription is still a barrier to research in the area.

Written media studies
Within the study of written media texts, there has been a growing body of quantitative and qualitative descriptive linguistic analyses by corpus linguists. Distinct registers, or genres, of media language are being examined using collections of empirical data. Biber et al. (1999), for example, identify the language of newspapers as one of the four major registers in all of the
English language, along with spoken conversation, academic writing, and fiction. In their grammar of the English language, they profile syntactic patterns and lexico-grammatical usage across all four of these registers. This gives us a baseline for the use and frequency of language patterns in newspapers, against which other media-based findings can be compared and contrasted. Much attention is given to genre analysis (see Swales 1990) in the study of the language of newspapers. That is where the language used in print media is described in terms of what makes it different to other ‘genres’ of language, and in so doing linguists aim for a better understanding of generic characteristics. Toolan (1988) examines the language of press advertising. Other studies have examined sports reporting in newspapers (Wallace 1977; Ghadessy
1988; Bhatia 1993).
Many studies identify the mutually defining link between language variation and context
(Halliday 1978; Leckie-Tarry 1995; Hasan 1996). Stubbs (1996) points out that texts encode representations of the world and so help to construct social reality. Thus textual analysis, he posits, is a vantage point from which to observe society. Other studies have looked at how different newspapers are socially stratified (see Bell 1991) and how this has an implication for the type of reality they construct for their respective readers. According to Hodge (1979: 157),
‘newspapers only supply partial versions of the world and what they do present depends on what is expected of that newspaper’. In another study, Bell (1991) looked at one linguistic variable, determiner deletion in appositional naming expressions (e.g. ‘Chairman of the board,
Michael Milken’ as opposed to non-determiner deletion: ‘The chairman of the board, Michael
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Milken’) and found that the ‘quality’ US broadsheets such as the Boston Globe, Washington
Post, Hartford Courant, and New York Times had a much lesser rate of determiner deletion than the popular press (i.e. tabloids). He concluded from this that the structure of determiner deletion reflects the social stratification of the papers in US print media.
According to Bell (1991), irrespective of what actually happens in real life, newspapers present their particular interpretations of events and so readers know in advance what they are buying. Along the same lines, McQuail (1994) claims that news content is moulded according to what journalists perceive the news public to find relevant and intrinsically interesting and he argues that the depiction of events in the print media is therefore inherently ideological. White
(1997) asserts that hard news reports construct a model of social order and that events or situations that are construed as threatening to that social order are deemed newsworthy.

Spoken media
Studies of how the spoken media, especially television, have evolved show a fascinating move from the deferential host to the performer/public persona. The formality and rigidness of the early years of television were underpinned by varying state broadcasting controls and prescripted interviews and performances. Corner (1991) provides an insight into the evolution of the media interview, particularly within documentaries. He attributes the change and development in the mid- to late 1950s, where interviews became more immediate and natural, to the move towards on-location reality settings for the actual interviews. This development, he suggests, freed the programme makers from the limitations of studio treatments and, along with ‘a newly democratic/populist sense of appropriate topics and framing’, helped to construct ‘naturalisms of behaviour and speech to exploit fully the possibilities for heightened immediacy and dynamism’ (1991: 40).
Whale (1977) tells us that, until the 1950s, the broadcast interview was of little importance largely because until then broadcasting the spoken word was traditionally regarded as a matter of reading the printed word aloud. Moreover, statutory requirement for impartiality was strictly interpreted. As Dimbleby (1975: 214) noted, the interview was not yet: a means of extracting painful or revealing information; it did not test or challenge ideas, beliefs, attitudes and assumptions. The interviewer had not yet become an official tribune of the people, or prosecuting counsel, or chat-show host. His job was to discover some very simple facts: if he did more than that, it was chance not design. It was not thought proper to enquire (even gently) into private lives, or social problems.
(Dimbleby 1975: 214)
Thus, as Wedell (1968) puts it, interviewers were little more than respectful prompters who fed the interviewees with soft soap questions in interviews that were often prearranged and lacking spontaneity (Day 1961). The broadcast interview was a set piece interaction in which the function of the interviewer was simply to provide a series of topic headings ‘for the carefully prepared views of famous men and women designed to impart to their viewers or listeners’
(Wedell 1968: 205). In the UK, the monopoly of deferential interviewing style prompted by the
BBC and copied by many national broadcasting stations was undermined with the advent of
Independent Television (ITV) in the mid-1950s. ITV producers took a looser interpretation of statutory obligations and brought more inquiry and investigation into news stories. This facilitated a more direct, searching and penetrating style of interviewing (Day 1961). Interviewers began to challenge and probe where previously they would have moved politely onto
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the next pre-arranged question. As a result, the news interview became a more flexible, lively, and influential instrument of journalistic inquiry, to the point where, for example, in the following extract, we see a serving British prime minister being challenged, contradicted and interrupted by his interviewer. The interview, in February 2003, was part of a special BBC
Newsnight programme in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. The interview, between then
British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and Newsnight’s presenter Jeremy Paxman, was held in front of a live public audience in Gateshead. In the later stages of the programme, the audience asked the prime minister questions. The transcript and video clip are available online.
[+ MARKS AN INTERRUPTED UTTERANCE]
JEREMY PAXMAN:

And you believe American intelligence?
TONY BLAIR:
Well I do actually believe this intelligence +
JEREMY PAXMAN: Because there are a lot of dead people in an aspirin factory in Sudan who don’t. TONY BLAIR:
Come on. This intelligence is backed up by our own intelligence and in any event, you know, we’re not coming to this without any history. I mean let’s not be absurdly naïve about this+
JEREMY PAXMAN: Hans Blix said he saw no evidence of hiding of weapons.
TONY BLAIR:
I’m sorry, what Hans Blix has said is that the Iraqis are not cooperating properly. (6 February 2003. Full transcript and actual interview available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/ hi/programmes/newsnight/2732979.stm) As mentioned earlier, discourse studies of the spoken media are relatively few given how pervasive it has been in everyday life, especially since the 1950s. As we pointed out, the challenge of recording and transcribing the ephemeral word has been the central impediment. The bulk of studies undertaken in the area of spoken media discourse centre around the analysis of turn organization within a CA framework (see below). Clayman and Heritage (2002: 7), for example, set as their goal to ‘examine the inner workings of the news interview in AngloAmerican society’. In line with CA methodology, they contrast the rules of conversation with what happens during news interviews. In comparing British and American news interviews, they conclude that in spite of different developments due, in part, to differing laws about broadcasting in these two countries, the development of news interviews and their current state is remarkably similar. They also explain that the practices that they describe are ‘shaped by the basic institutional conditions of broadcast journalism in Western democracies’ (2002: 337).
Harris (1991) looks at political interviews and how politicians in particular respond evasively to questions in interviews. She finds that there is empirical evidence that politicians are evasive in political interviews especially when compared to responses with other non-politician respondents. She also notes that politicians are to a certain degree constrained by the syntax of the question and they are not free to ignore it with impunity. Blum-Kulka (1983) attempts to define the relationship between questions and answers in political interviews within the confines of different types of cohesion. Jucker (1986), in his study of news interviews, maintains that it is difficult to determine on syntactic grounds whether a politician has given a direct answer to a question. Clayman (1993) looks at how reformulations of interviewers’ questions by the interviewee, as a preface to a response, can be used both to answer questions and to manipulate them and evade answering them in various ways, for example shifting the topical agenda, ignoring the second part of a two-part question, agreeing with some embedded proposition in the question without engaging with the main proposition, and so on. Carter and McCarthy (2002)
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tell us that conversation analysts, discourse analysts and pragmaticians have revealed much about the political interview and other broadcast interviews as genres, and have done so largely by comparing interviews with the social, pragmatic or structural norms of everyday mundane conversation. In this way, phenomena such as sequential organization, preference organization, turn-taking, topic management, opening and closure, etc. have been accurately described as indices of the unique generic configuration of the broadcast interview.
Apart from news interviews, radio chat shows and phone-ins have been the focus of various studies. Hutchby (1996a: 4) noted that many studies of talk radio fail to focus on the talk that actually takes place. Hutchby’s analytical standpoint is firmly within the CA tradition. He points out that talk radio is a form of institutionalized interaction, where talk takes place within an organization, the broadcasting company, which has its own structure and stability
(Hutchby 1996a: 7). Within the CA model, this structure and stability, as discussed by analysts such as Boden (1994) and Drew and Heritage (1992), propagates itself through talk and interaction. Hutchby’s work focuses on The Brian Hayes Show, a daily show on London’s LBC station (see Hutchby 1991, 1992, 1995, 1996a, 1996b, 1999).

Research methods and paradigms in media discourse
The dominant, though not exclusive, research method for the study of spoken language has been CA, while the study of written texts in the media has been dominated by studies of power and ideology within the research paradigm of critical discourse analysis (CDA).

Conversation analysis
CA focuses on the social organization of conversation, or ‘talk-in-interaction’, by a detailed inspection of tape recordings and transcriptions (ten Have 1986). Core to its inductive analysis of the structure of conversations are the following areas (see Richards et al. 1992):
1

2

3
4

How speakers decide when to speak during conversation, i.e. the rules and systematicity governing turn-taking (the turn-taking structure of casual conversation was delineated in the influential paper by Sacks et al. 1974).
How speaker turns can be related to each other in sequence and might be said to go together as adjacency pairs (for example, complaint + denial A: You left the light on. B: It wasn’t me.).
How turns are organized in their local sequential context at any given point in an interaction and the systematicity of these sequences of utterances (see Schegloff 1982).
How seemingly minor or mundane changes in placement within utterances and across turns are organized and meaningful (for example, the difference between the placement of a vocative at the beginning, mid or end point of an utterance; see Jefferson 1973).

The turn-by-turn analysis of CA has made it very applicable to the study of areas such as radio talk shows and phone-ins (for example, Hutchby 1991; Thornborrow 2001a, 2003b,
2001c; Rama Martínez 2003). Hutchby and Wooffitt (1998) point out that as far as CA is concerned, what characterizes interaction as institutional is not to do with theories of social structure but with the special character of speech exchange systems that participants can be found to orient to. Take for example this contrast between the canonical (or typical) sequence of turns in a telephone call between callers who have an unmarked relationship (that is, neither intimates nor strangers, Drew and Chilton 2000) from Schegloff (1986):
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Canonical call opening between ‘unmarked forms
Summons-answer:
0. Phone rings
1. Answerer:
Identification-recognition:
2. Caller:
3. Answerer:
4. Caller:
Greetings:
5. Answerer:
6. Caller:
‘How are you?’ sequences: 7. Caller:
8. Answerer:
9. Caller:
10. Answerer:
First Topic:
11. Caller:

of relationships’
Hello
Hello Jim?
Yeah
‘s Bonnie
Hi
Hi
How are yuh
Fine, how’re you
Oh, okay I guess
Oh okay
What are you doing New Year’s Eve?

Compare this with the call opening sequence presented by Whalen and Zimmerman (1987) as the typical sequence between strangers on an emergency phone line:
Call opening between strangers – Whalen and Zimmerman 1987 (after Hopper and
Drummond 1992: 191)
Summons-Answer:
0. Phone rings
1. Answerer:
Mid-city Emergency
Business of Call:
2. Caller:
Um yeah. Somebody jus’ vandalized my car.
Compare both of these with a call opening sequence in a radio phone-in show. Ostensibly, the participants are strangers:
Call opening from the Brian Hayes Show (a radio talk show broadcast on LBC radio, adapted from Hutchby 1991: 120–21)
Summons, identification
& greeting:
1. Presenter: John is calling from Ilford good morning
Greeting, identification,
& business of call:
2. Caller:
h. good morning Brian (pause: 0.4).hh what I’m phoning up is about the cricket
What CA does powerfully is to show us typical patterns or sequences of turn organization and allows us see, by comparison, as Hutchby and Wooffitt (1998) put it, the special character of speech exchange systems that participants can be found to orient to. In the three extracts above we can see how, in institutional interactions, the turn sequences are attenuated (i.e. cut short). We can see that in the radio example, the typical call opening sequence is turned on its head when the ‘answerer’, that is the radio presenter in this case, conducts the summons, identification and greeting stage and the adjacent pair to this on the part of the caller is the reciprocation of greeting, identification and identification of the business of the call. This is all achieved in two turns compared with the canonical sequence which does not get to the business of the call until turn 11.
In this way, CA provides a research paradigm which has facilitated the detailed analysis of news interviews using natural conversation as a baseline for comparison. Heritage (1985), for example, compares questions-and-answer sequences in news interviews with casual conversation and
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courtroom interactions and finds that unlike casual conversation, it is possible to search through hours of courtroom and news interview interactions without encountering a single mm hm, oh newsmarker (see Jefferson 1984) or affiliative assessment. Instead, Heritage tells us, the interviews are conducted almost exclusively through chains of questions and answers, and in so doing, he claims, narratives are elicited step-by-step or opinions are developed and elaborated component-by-component.
Greatbatch (1988) profiles the turn-taking conventions of interviews using the baseline canonical framework provided by Sacks et al. (1974) as a comparison. He notes that interviewers and interviewees generally confine themselves, respectively, to turn-types recognizable as questions and answers. The interviewer does not normally engage in a wide range of responses that questioners normally engage in when they react to what they hear in a casual conversation (see Schegloff 1982; Jefferson 1984; Greatbatch 1986; Tottie 1991; McCarthy and
Carter 2000; McCarthy 2002). Clayman (1991) looks in detail at news interview openings and concludes that they are highly organized so as to achieve institutional ends: (a) they mark the encounter from the outset as having been pre-assembled on behalf of the viewing audience, and (b) they set the agenda for the interview which is linked to newsworthy events in the world at large.
CA therefore has provided a very useful research paradigm for the study of media discourse by comparing its turn sequentiality with the canonical sequences of everyday conversation.
The shortcoming of CA, however, is that it looks in detail at short sequences of interaction at turn level. CDA on the other hand is more focused on the recurring use of certain lexical items and how these are linked to ideology.

Critical discourse analysis
As discussed above, CDA brings a critical perspective to the study of media discourse. This involves the researcher taking a critical stance in respect of a media text. In applying a CDA framework, the researcher is not looking at the language in a neutral descriptive way, she/he is addressing fundamental issues of injustice and exposing how language has been used to sustain dominant ideologies. As O’Halloran (2010) puts it, CDA seeks to illuminate how language use contributes to the domination and misrepresentation of certain social groups.
CDA, it is argued, goes beyond academic inquiry. As van Dijk (1997: 22–3) explains, the
‘ultimate goal is not only scientific, but also social and political, namely change’; or as
O’Halloran (2010: 564) puts it, CDA is ‘a form of social critique’ which ‘encourages reflection on social and cultural processes and their relationship with language use’ (see also O’Halloran, this volume). Over the years, Fairclough has contributed much to the study of language and the media and has raised awareness as to its importance (see also Fairclough 1988, 1989,
1995b, 2000). According to Fairclough (2000: 158–9), CDA ‘sees language as one element of a social practice … this approach is particularly concerned with social change as it affects discourse, and with how it connects with social relations of power and domination’.
While CDA offers a powerful research framework, it often falls short as a research instrument because it can be overly qualitative. In other words, its assertions can be criticized on the basis of being overly interpretative or even subjective. However, this has been overcome by the use of corpus linguistics as a means of looking at language patterns across large amounts of media texts. By way of example, let’s return to the BBC interview quoted from above, between
Jeremy Paxman and Tony Blair. In this one short extract from the prime minister, we could make a statement about power and ideology based on the use of the pronoun we (marked in italic): 74

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Tony Blair: The danger is that if we allow Iraq to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons they will threaten their own region, there is no way that we would be able to exclude ourselves from any regional conflict there was there as indeed we had to become involved last time they committed acts of external aggression against Kuwait.
We could say that the prime minister appropriates the use of we to speak from the nation, in other words, he is positioning himself dominantly as the unified voice of Britain facing unanimously into war. We could extract many further examples to back up the above assertion but if we apply corpus linguistics, in tandem with CDA, we have a very powerful means of showing consistent use of language. We will return to this example below and apply corpus linguistic software to the interview.

Corpus linguistics
Corpus linguistics is essentially a research instrument which has application to many areas. It involves the principled gathering of spoken or written texts in electronic form to make a corpus. These can be explored using software which typically carries out the core functions of
(1) word frequency counts, (2) key word calculations, and (3) key word in context (KWIK) searches (see Evison 2010; Scott 2010 and Adolphs and Lin, this volume, for an overview). For the purposes of the study of media discourse, it means that a researcher can address research questions over a large amount of data. The core functions of corpus software allow the researcher not only to look within the texts or transcripts but to compare these findings with other contexts. For example, the theme of evaluation, that is the expression of opinion (and ultimately stance), is one which has emerged strongly and is also linked to the use of more qualitative approaches to looking at media discourse through the use of corpora. Bednarek
(2006a, 2006b) presents a corpus-based account of evaluation, which is based on 100 newspaper articles (a 70,000 word corpus), drawn from both tabloid and broadsheet media. Bednarek’s work is quantitative and she provides detailed explanations and justifications of her framework of evaluation and bias in newspapers. O’Keeffe (2006) looks at over 200,000 words of transcripts from radio phone-ins, chat shows and political interviews from around the world.
Possibly the greater potential for CL, however, is in how it can complement other research frameworks. For example, O’Keeffe and Breen (2007), using over a corpus of 500,000 words of newspaper reports on child sexual abuse cases, over five years, conducted a content analysis and corpus-based lexiogrammatical analysis. The corpus-based component was able to provide consistent evidence for the findings from the content analysis component of the study. Carter and McCarthy (2002) show how CA and CL can work together when they look at one BBC radio interview with former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, using a dual approach to its analysis. First, they apply the framework of CA in their analysis and subsequently they conduct corpus-based analysis on the same data. They conclude that the CA analysis shows that the interviewer and interviewee both adhere to and exploit the generic conventions of the interview in terms of turn-taking, topic management and participant relationships. The interviewer presses an agenda of getting the interviewee to commit to action; the interviewee, in turn, responds cohesively and coherently and yet avoids direct commitment to action and maintains his topical agenda without losing face (and with useful soundbites delivered along the way, which are likely to be extracted and quoted in subsequent national news bulletins).
The application of corpus techniques to the transcript reveals much about the lexical environment, especially the semantic prosody of the high-frequency key words. Carter and
McCarthy show how CA and corpus linguistics can complement each other and offer a more
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integrated way of understanding how conversational agendas are achieved when the two methods are used in combination than either of them can aspire to alone.
O’Halloran (2010) shows how CL can be a powerful complementary tool to CDA when he examines a set of texts over a six-week period in the British popular tabloid newspaper The
Sun on the topic of the European Union (EU) expansion on 1 May 2004. The corpus he built consists of Sun texts in the six weeks prior to 1 May which contain the cultural keywords:
‘(im)migration’, ‘(im)migrant(s)’, ‘EU’ and ‘European’. In all, the corpus comprises seventy-six texts, a total of 26,350 words, and is in chronological order from 20 March to 30 April 2004.
O’Halloran is able to show, in a convincing and powerful way, how the language and ideology were intertwined in that period. For example, key words such as ‘high unemployment’,
‘impoverished’, ‘poor’ were linked to ‘Eastern European’ and were tied up with the presupposition that EU enlargement would mean that migrants would be a drain on social services, etc.
By way of further illustration, we return to the BBC public interview between Tony Blair and Jeremy Paxman. Above we looked at one extract from what the prime minister said and made claims about his use of the pronoun we. By saving the transcript of the interview as a plain text file and using concordance software to search for we, we can make the following empirically-based assertion and hence illustrate the complementarity of CDA and CL:
We is used 49 times in the interview and 86 per cent of these are uttered by the Prime
Minister to mean, ‘we the people of Britain who are in favour of going to war’. As such, it shows a consistent dominant use of the pronoun to coercively position the people of
Britain in line with the Prime Minister’s stance on the justification of invading Iraq.

New media
The explosion of new media poses interesting challenges for the study of discourse in the media. Access to ‘the media’ used to be in the control of broadcasting companies. New media are there for the ordinary person to access as long as they have the technological know-how and the necessary hardware. Therefore, ‘the media’ is now much more ‘our media’. The process of democratization means that lay people can access and ‘broadcast’ on new media such as the Internet and mobile phone technology, through Websites, blogs, wikis, tweets and text messages. In addition, the ever-expanding possibilities of virtual social networks mean that private personae can now co-exist in a public identity, within a shared social network. Such advances bring about new mediated participation frameworks (after Goffman 1981) and as a result mark another phase of change in how language is used. This change is revolutionary because of its democratized nature, and merits academic exploration.
Traditional definitions have mutated. We now see greater levels of intertextuality and a blurring of the lines between spoken and written media. Newspapers have Web and video links and sound clips, television news programmes have text on screen and Websites where you can
‘chat’. Social network pages can link to clips for television, radio, newspapers as well as broadcast the mundane and minute from participants’ daily lives, such as ‘Going for a coffee’, ‘Oh no, time to wash the dog’, ‘Remind me never to go to a Whitney Houston concert again’, and so on.
This kind of new order of things renders many old metaphors and frameworks anachronistic. In the literature, the accepted metaphor for audiences seemed to be ‘overhearers’ or
‘eavesdroppers’. For example, Montgomery (1986: 428) refers to the audience as the ‘overhearing recipient of a discourse’ (see also Heritage 1985).
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Now, with the advent of new media, audiences regularly voice their opinion and the traditional media of radio and television now regularly solicit text messages and tweets in real time during shows and report these back to the audience. As such, the television and radio audiences have been ‘brought into the room’ (or have brought themselves into the room) whereas before the hearing status of the audience in broadcast genres (such as radio phone-ins, TV chat shows, news interviews and so on) was for the most part ignored by analysts (see O’Keeffe
2006: ch. 3 for a detailed discussion).

Looking to the future
Because of the advent of new media, and the ever-changing nature of these, it is both an exciting and challenging time in the study of media discourse. There is a wealth of uncharted research territory. The arrival of ‘the audience voice’ into traditional media of television, radio and newpapers needs to be redefined and analyzed. The constructing of public identities on social networking sites, blogs and tweets, the creating and sustaining of these social networks, linguistically, also beg to be explored. However, the challenges remain. First, at a methodological level, the additionality of using CL to provide quantitative back-up to the qualitative approaches of CA and CDA needs to be reflected upon and scrutinized. Second, there needs to be a paradigm shift in terms of how we define communication within ‘the new media’. In the old days, we could say that there were newspapers and there were readers or there were television or radio presenters and their audiences. The new democratized nature of things in the media begs for a new paradigm to encapsulate the changed dynamics, power structures, participation frameworks and discourses that are ever-emerging.

Related topics
CDA; corpus linguistics; discourse analysis

Further reading
Bednarek, M. (2006) Evaluation in Media Discourse: Analysis of a Newspaper Corpus, London:
Continuum. (A corpus-based study of evaluation in newspapers based on a corpus of 100 newspaper articles comprising a 70,000 word corpus, from both tabloid and broadsheet media.) Horton, D. and Wohl, R. R. (1956) ‘Mass communication and para-social interaction: observations on intimacy at a distance’, reprinted in G. Gumpert and R. Cathcart (eds) (1979) Inter/Media:
Interpersonal Communication in a Media World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Given that this was written in the early days of television, it provides thought-provoking material that still has relevance to current-day studies of the media.)
O’Halloran, K. A. (2010) ‘How to use corpus linguistics in the study of media discourse’, in
A. O’Keeffe and M. J. McCarthy (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, London:
Routledge. (An insightful illustration of the application of corpus linguistics to critical discourse analysis, using a corpus of articles from the UK newspaper, The Sun, as a case study.)
O’Keeffe, A. (2006) Investigating Media Discourse, London: Routledge. (A look at spoken media discourse using a combination of approaches including conversation analysis, discourse analysis and pragmatics in the exploration of a corpus of over 200,000 words of spoken media interactions.) Stubbs, M. (1996) Text and Corpus Analysis: Computer-assisted Studies of Language and Culture,
Oxford: Blackwell. (This book provides the ground-breaking framework for the computer-assisted analysis of texts and shows how corpus analysis can give insights into culturally significant patterns of language use.)
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