ABSTRACT

The study of newspapers and other mass media involves the study of a set of interrelated communities. There is the community constituted by the act of communication, those who produce the paper and those who read it. There are three basic ways of arriving at the underlying structure or ideology of a paper. One would be to ask the editor what he thought it was, and hope that he told the truth and nothing but the truth; or look at the instructions or guidelines that maintain the editorial policy in practice. Another would be to start from the world of events, and trace the process of transmutation stage by stage to its final form in the paper. The third starting point for analysis would be with the finished product, the newspaper itself, attempting to work back to the underlying categories. There is a marked discrepancy between the Sun's and The Times' language of headlines.