ABSTRACT
The mass media provide the means of access to much information and represent a potentially powerful force in our society. They can select what is news, who gets into the papers and onto television and radio and, most importantly for linguists, the way that those stories get told, and the frameworks in which people get to appear and talk. However, we must be careful when talking about the media as 'they'. Any newspaper story goes through several stages before it appears on the page, and many different people can be involved at each stage. The same is true of broadcast news stories. Rather than seeing the media as being a group of individuals who control and in some way manipulate what we read or watch, we need to think of each medium as a complex institution. This institution is characterised by a set of processes, practices and conventions that the people within it have developed within a particular social and cultural context. These practices have an effect both on what we perceive as news, and on the forms in which we expect to hear or read about it.
