Language in the News

Discourse and Ideology in the Press

Roger Fowler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136095726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Newspaper coverage of world events is presented as the unbiased recording of `hard facts`. In an incisive study of both the quality and the popular press, Roger Fowler challenges this perception, arguing that news is a practice, a product of the social and political world on which it reports. Writing from the perspective of critical linguistics, Fowler examines the crucial role of language in mediating reality. Starting with a general account of news values and the processes of selection and transformation which go to make up the news, Fowler goes on to consider newspaper representations of gender, power, authority and law and order. He discusses stereotyping, terms of abuse and endearment, the editorial voice and the formation of consensus. Fowler's analysis takes in some of the major news stories of the Thatcher decade - the American bombing of Libya in 1986, the salmonella-in-eggs affair, the problems of the National Health Service and the controversy of youth and contraception.

Chapter 1

Introduction: the importance of language in the news

This is a study of how language is used in newspapers to form ideas and beliefs. I take the view that the ‘content’ of newspapers is not facts about the world, but in a very general sense ‘ideas’. I will use other terms as appropriate: ‘beliefs’, ‘values’, ‘theories’, ‘propositions’, ‘ideology’. My major concern is with the role of linguistic structure in the construction of ideas in the Press; I will show that language is not neutral, but a highly constructive mediator.

The journalist takes a different view. He or she collects facts, reports them objectively, and the newspaper presents them fairly and without bias, in language which is designed to be unambiguous, undistorting and agreeable to readers. This professional ethos is common to all the news media, Press, radio and television, and it is certainly what the journalist claims in any general statement on the matter. For example, the following statement by Andrew Neil, the editor of the Sunday Times, introducing a book on the 1984–5 miners’ strike written by that paper’s journalists, asserts that though a newspaper may have a clear editorial position on some topic reported, that is reserved for the leader column, while the news reporting itself, on other pages, is factual and unbiased:

From the start, The Sunday Times took a firm editorial line: for the sake of liberal democracy, economic recovery and the rolling back of union power, and for the sake of the sensible voices in the Labour Party and the TUC, Scargill and his forces had to be defeated, and would be. It was a position from which we never wavered throughout this long, brutal dispute. Our views, however, were kept to where they belong in a quality newspaper: the editorial column. For us the miners’ strike was above all a massive reporting and analysing task to give our readers an impartial and well-informed picture of what was really happening.¹

In recent years, the professional journalist’s self-image on this question of impartiality has come under strong challenge from students of the media. Notably the Glasgow University Media Group, and the University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, have in their various research publications elaborated an alternative picture of news practices; a picture which is current generally among sociologists and other students of the media.² On this model, news is socially constructed. What events are reported is not a reflection of the intrinsic importance of those events, but reveals the operation of a complex and artificial set of criteria for selection. Then, the news that has been thus selected is subject to processes of transformation as it is encoded for publication; the technical properties of the medium – television or newsprint, for example – and the ways in which they are used, are strongly effective in this transformation. Both ‘selection’ and ‘transformation’ are guided by reference, generally unconscious, to ideas and beliefs. Analysis of output can reveal abstract propositions which are not necessarily stated, and are usually unquestioned, and which dominate the structure of presentation. One such was the proposition ‘wage increases cause inflation’ which the Glasgow Group discovered dominated the television presentation of industrial news in the first half of 1975. It is further claimed by students of the media that such propositions tend to be consonant with the ideas of the controlling groups in an industrial-capitalist society, because news is an industry with its own commercial self-interest. Thus news is a practice: a discourse which, far from neutrally reflecting social reality and empirical facts, intervenes in what Berger and Luckmann call ‘the social construction of reality’.³ (I hasten to assure readers that one can believe that news is a practice without also believing that news is a conspiracy.)

This argument – which I will report in more detail in chapter 2 – is not peculiar to media studies, but has its counterparts in the sociology of knowledge (hence my reference to Berger and Luckmann’s book), semiotics and linguistics, the major branch of semiotics. In his book Understanding News, John Hartley very constructively places the usual contemporary account of news as a social and ideological produce within the framework of general semiotic theory, and this seems to me the proper intellectual context for the analysis of media.⁴ The foundations of semiotics were laid by the early-twentieth-century Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. In the form of their contemporary acceptance, these principles are roughly as follows. Between human beings and the world they experience, there exist systems of signs which are the product of society. Signs acquire meaning through being structured into codes, the principal code being language. Other codes abound; they are language-like in their structural properties, but more transient, less stable. The analyses offered by Roland Barthes in his book Mythologies are very suggestive of the power of coding in such areas as fashion, architecture, cuisine and sport.⁵ Codes endow the world with meaning or significance by organizing it into categories and relationships which are not there ‘naturally’, but which represent the interests, values and behaviours of human communities. So, for example, the distinction between ‘plants’ and ‘weeds’ is a semiotic, not botanical, difference: it stems from the tastes and fashions of a gardening culture, and is coded in the vocabulary of their language. The existence of these two words, with their conventionally opposed meanings, allows us to communicate about the objects concerned. But communication between people is not the only function of the language code. Language and other codes, most importantly language, have a cognitive role: they provide an organized mental representation for our experience. Whatever the ‘natural’ structure of the world, whether indeterminate flux, as Saussure seems to have believed, or some other structure (from a semiotic point of view it does not matter), we handle it mentally, and in discourse, in terms of the conventional meaning-categories embodied in our society’s codes.

In chapters 3 to 5 I will give a fuller exposition of the linguistic model which supports this theory and analysis, but here I will just anticipate, briefly, the further linguistic apparatus that will be brought into play. It is clear that the argument needs greater psychological and social refinement than is found in Saussure and in the more recent French semioticians. We need, first, to say something more about the relationship between the semantic (meaning) structure of the language code, and the mental organization of experience. On this question, I will refer to the ideas of the American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, and of the British linguist M. A. K. Halliday.⁶ These theoreticians maintain that there is a causal relationship between semantic structure and cognition: that language influences thought, in the sense that its structure channels our mental experience of the world. This claim, which is expressed by its proponents in various terms and with varying degrees of force, is impossible of empirical proof, and has to be handled cautiously, treated as a working hypothesis rather than a finding. There is, however, some relevant psycholinguistic research.⁷

The social dimension of this theory is more secure, because it is easy to see correlations between differences of code and differences of social setting. The style of the Sun newspaper is very different from that of the Independent, and the readerships of the two papers are very distinct socioeconomically. Presumably, this linguistic and social co-variation is significant. Many aspects of the correlation between linguistic form and social setting have been studied by sociolinguists,⁸ and here again Halliday is extremely helpful. He draws attention to the tremendous range of sociolinguistic variety to be found within a single whole language such as English, and he enquires into the functions of this variety both in delimiting social groups and also in encoding the different ideologies of those groups.

My accounts of language in newspapers, and, I believe, the analyses of news media offered by the authorities I have cited, can be regarded as merely specific instances of the general principles I have just sketched. News is a representation of the world in language; because language is a semiotic code, it imposes a structure of values, social and economic in origin, on whatever is represented; and so inevitably news, like every discourse, constructively patterns that of which it speaks. News is a representation in this sense of construction; it is not a value-free reflection of ‘facts’. The final theoretical point to make here is that I assume as a working principle that each particular form of linguistic expression in a text – wording, syntactic option, etc. – has its reason. There are always different ways of saying the same thing, and they are not random, accidental alternatives. Differences in expression carry ideological distinctions (and thus differences in representation). The point is sometimes obvious: clearly it is significant whether a political leader is referred to as ‘Gorby’ or ‘Mr Gorbachev’, whether the opening of the borders in Eastern Europe is headlined ‘REDS HEAD WEST’ or ‘Thousands cross border into West Germany’. But these grossly visible alternatives, their meanings on open display, are only a small part of the ideological working of linguistic expression. Many other aspects of language, less dramatic but equally forceful in shaping representation, can be brought to the surface for observation. This book is concerned primarily with the analysis of those linguistic features which work subliminally in the newspapers’ ideological practice of representation.

The prevailing orthodoxy of linguistics is that it is a descriptive discipline which has no business passing comments on materials which it analyses; neither prescribing usage nor negatively evaluating the substance of its enquiries. But I see no reason why there should not be branches of linguistics with different goals and procedures, and since values are so thoroughly implicated in linguistic usage, it seems justifiable to practise a kind of linguistics directed towards understanding such values, and this is the branch which has become known as critical linguistics.⁹ That is the method followed in this book. Now, the word ‘critical’ could be intended, or taken to be intended, to denote negative evaluation, but this negativity is not necessarily the aim of critical linguistics. As far as I am concerned, critical linguistics simply means an enquiry into the relations between signs, meanings and the social and historical conditions which govern the semiotic structure of discourse, using a particular kind of linguistic analysis.¹⁰ This activity requires a very specific model of linguistics. The model has not only to identify, and to label reliably, certain key linguistic constructions; it has to relate them to context in a special way. The familiar transformational-generative linguistics invented by Noam Chomsky¹¹ provides my eclectic model with some descriptive terminology, but is in general terms unsuitable, because its aim is to refer linguistic structures to the set of structural possibilities that are available to human language as a universal phenomenon, presumably genetically programmed in the human brain; Chomsky is not interested in the role of language in real use (and indeed will not allow such matters to be a valid concern of linguistics). Halliday’s systemic-functional linguistics, on the other hand, is specifically geared to relating structure to communicative function, and this model provides most of my descriptive apparatus. Chapters 3 to 5 elaborate the detail.

Several lines of interest converged to cause me to write this book. I was keen to develop the critical linguistics model, first sketched in Fowler, Hodge, Kress and Trew, Language and Control (1979) and then used in a scatter of studies by the original authors and by other colleagues. I wanted more experience of this analysis, in order to improve the technical details, and to discover what kinds of construction could be relied on to reward critical readers with insights; and I wanted to clarify the general theory, which was, and is, abstract and controversial. But my enthusiasm was not only a matter of technical interest in the model. I reflected that my work in the early 1980s, in a series of occasional lectures and articles, had become increasingly focused on the British Press – which was not my field in Language and Control, but a topic brilliantly explored by Tony Trew in two pioneering chapters. The newspapers became compulsive reading in this period of major and distressing events and processes: the Falklands War, escalating unemployment, disorder and violence, bombings, the miners’ strike, the deployment of cruise missiles, nuclear accidents culminating in the Chernobyl disaster, the American bombing of Libya, the privatization of basic services such as water, the reduction of public funding for health and education, and so on. A number of political factors in this period seemed to me to have important and analysable implications for a reader’s experience of newspaper language. I will just refer to three major problems by way of brief examples.

First, the paradoxical ideology of conflict and consensus. As has been pointed out by many political commentators, the Conservative government under Mrs Thatcher from 1979 to 1990 theorized social and international relationships in terms of conflict: striking versus non-striking miners; metropolitan councils versus central government; ‘state-sponsored terrorism’ versus ‘self-defence’; ‘appeasement’ (and its advocates, such as CND) versus ‘peace through defence’; and so on. I felt that public discourse, both political and media utterances, played a powerful role in establishing the categories which were sorted into these conflictual oppositions, and that the sorting could be directly observed in the details of linguistic construction (see chapters 6 to 8). But while the practice was to segregate and marginalize threatening and undesirable elements, the official discourse of government and media spoke of national unity of interest and common purpose: consensus. In a hypocritical attempt to resolve contradiction, the division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ was discursively reprocessed as ‘we’: ‘just about every person in the land’ as the Sun expressed it.

A second change, and problem, in the 1980s was the centralization and monetarization of power and authority. People in the best position to manage public affairs were stripped of their authority to do so. For example, local councils, and professionals such as doctors and teachers, were deprived of the ability to practise properly, and to work in the interests of the people, by a combination of strategies: legislative changes which withdrew local powers in favour of the authority of Westminster; reductions of public funding in many spheres, far below the levels needed to run a university, say, or a hospital; and discursive strategies working to reorganize conventional expectations of authority towards new, rigid and impractical hierarchies. In chapter 6, pp. 105–9, I analyse one set of newspaper materials which works in part to establish doctors as very low down in the medical ladder of power.

The third change of the 1980s is related to the second, but it was managed primarily discursively. This was the propaganda of individual responsibility or self-reliance. The government systematically depleted the resources and protections available for those in need: unemployed, sick in mind or body, elderly, abused or deprived in whatever way. Psychiatric hospitals and wards were closed down, and their clients pushed out to ‘community care’; old-age pensions were allowed to fall in value, while tax concessions were offered to pensioners who were willing to work or to insure for their own medical treatment; food research was deprived of funding, at a time of an alleged food poisoning ‘epidemic’, on the grounds that the food industry should pay for research which benefits it. In every case, the saving of central funds resulting from these moves was justified in terms of people’s wish to look after themselves, not to be ‘nannied’. The media played a major role in promulgating the argument of individual responsibility: see, for example, the attempt to shift the food poisoning scare from the industry to ‘the housewife’, chapter 10.

I end this Introduction with a simple point about method. The ‘standard position’ of current students of the media is that news is a construct which is to be understood in social and semiotic terms; and everyone acknowledges the importance of language in this process of construction. But in practice, language gets relatively meagre treatment, when it comes to analysis: the Glasgow Group, and Hartley, for example, are more interested in, and better equipped technically to analyse, visual techniques in television. More Bad News does devote three chapters to language, but the analysis is anecdotal and lacking in detail (from a linguist’s point of view). In the present study, language is given fundamental importance, not only as an analytic instrument, but also as the way of expressing a general theory of representation which is entirely congruent with the theory assumed by other, non-linguistic researchers.

This book, then, offers a dimension of analysis which is skimpily or unsystematically treated in current media studies, the linguistic dimension; I approach it using the tools of one specific linguistic model, ‘critical linguistics’. In order to give a full treatment of one level, I have of course had to pay little attention to other dimensions of analysis. For example, I have largely ignored the graphic format of the page, a dimension which is crucially important to the organization of newspaper text. I am well aware that typographical choices (style and size of print), composition and the deployment of photographs, drawings, cartoons, tables, maps, captions, etc., are of immense sign...