ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book analyses press treatments of matters which are of intense concern in contemporary life: inequality, discrimination, inhumanity, war. It provides other concerned readers some practical help in decoding newspaper discourse, and in thinking about and discussing life issues and their representation. The book is concerned primarily with the analysis of those linguistic features which work subliminally in the newspapers’ ideological practice of representation. It also provides a fuller exposition of the linguistic model which supports general semiotic theory and analysis, but it anticipates, briefly, the further linguistic apparatus that will be brought into play. The book offers a dimension of analysis which is skimpily or unsystematically treated in current media studies, the linguistic dimension. The book also analyses one set of newspaper materials which works in part to establish doctors as very low down in the medical ladder of power.
