ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we explore the language used in the media. If we consider ‘mass media’ to be information communicated ‘from one sender to a large audience’ (Jucker 2003: 132), it is a very broad field. While we will touch on a few aspects of social media, we’ll be largely dealing with news media. This might seem to be quite a narrow focus, but consideration of the mass news media allows us to think about how particular ideologies are communicated and maintained, the linguistic choices that help do this, what counts as news, as well as the changes in mass media news reporting. The key theme underpinning this chapter is one of literacy, that is, the skills audiences need to read and understand the texts they find in the mass media. The changing face of the mass news media means that audiences must continuously learn how to interpret new texts. These skills, these literacy practices, are a form of power. It will become clear that knowing how to read a text is a skill that is a form of symbolic capital.
