Understanding News

Book description

News depends for its effect on a culturally shared language, and this book concentrates on ways we can decode its messages without simply reproducing their underlying assumptions.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Acknowledgements
  7. General editor’s preface
  8. 1 News as communication
    1. In the beginning
    2. News-discourse
    3. Talking and writing about the news
  9. 2 Reading the news
    1. Reality and relationships
    2. Sign-systems
    3. Signs
    4. Paradigm and syntagm
    5. Multi-accentuality
    6. Orientation
    7. Connotation and myth
    8. Icons
    9. Simultaneous signifiers
    10. Codes and conventions
    11. Discourses and referents
    12. Socially-structured discourse
  10. 3 News and society
    1. Topics
    2. Treatment
    3. Telling
    4. News in society
    5. Capital
    6. The State
    7. Relative autonomy and ideology
    8. Winning consent: hegemony
    9. From class to culture
  11. 4 Those who threaten disorder
    1. Preferred readings and ideological closure
    2. ‘News at Ten’
    3. Trial by semiotics
  12. 5 Selection and construction
    1. News values
    2. Mapping reality: consensus
    3. Mapping the outsiders: dissent
  13. 6 Hail fellow well met
    1. Mode of address
    2. Common sense and images of the audience: conversation
    3. Common sense and ‘understanding’: the bardic function
  14. 7 A winter of discontent
    1. Elements of news narrative: visual structures
    2. Institutional and accessed voices: verbal structures
    3. News narrative: fact and fiction
    4. The ‘Nine O’clock News’
  15. 8 Producing the news: for ourselves
    1. Producing the audience
    2. Losing the audience
    3. The ‘other’news
    4. Finding the audience
  16. 9 Consuming interest
    1. Experience and mediation
    2. Subjectivity
    3. How is ideology ‘consumed’?
    4. Man-made news
    5. Negotiating with ideology
  17. 10 Criticizing the news: what to do and where to find it
    1. Projects
    2. Alternatives
    3. Further reading and study
  18. Conclusion
  19. References
  20. Index

Product information

  • Title: Understanding News
  • Author(s): John Hartley
  • Release date: June 2013
  • Publisher(s): Routledge
  • ISBN: 9781136105968