ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an historical overview of approaches to critical theory that have analyzed the ideological significance of media. It covers a range of analytical approaches to news, discourse, and ideology from critical perspectives beyond linguistics. The chapter demonstrates the growing necessity to understand the ideological and discursive practices of news given the rapid developments of digital and social media contexts. In terms of news discourse and journalism, textual features are all seen to occur through decision-making processes in their cultural and professional contexts. The discourse-mythological approach was developed with two main objectives: to use the tools of critical discourse analysis to analyze discursive constructions of mythology in news stories; and to show how myth theory can demonstrate cultural, semiotic, archetypal, and ideological functions of news discourse and journalistic storytelling. Ideologies are not monolithic, and they operate through multiple social, economic, and technological influences.
