SUMMARY OF CHAPTER 37: DISCOURSE AND MEDIA BY COLLEEN COTTER

By Anais Valdivia, section 3.

This chapter, written by Collen Cotter, begins by talking about the concept of "media" in the past,
mentioning an observation by Marshall McLuhan's, who posits the concept of media as a message.
In this way, the author explains that images and words alone do not tell the story; and that a key
part of this process is how we receive the news or through which channel we receive them. Cotter
continues his idea by mentioning that the concept of the media has been developing over time,
and that new digital platforms and social networks have been born, which due to some changes
they have produced (changes in the form of transmission, participation, and presentation of the
stories, etc.), have been causing an increase in Discourse and language in the medium. The author
ends his introduction by stating that the main idea of this chapter is the analysis of the media, in
order to show dimensions of discourse of all kinds. He also mentions that another important idea
of the chapter is the analysis of the foundations and developments of media discourse research,
beginning with the development of the media discourse analysis subfield.

In developing “DISCOURSE IN MEDIA”, Cotter mentions that the foundations of media discourse,
or the work of media linguistics that has established current iterations of the subfield, were
founded by British scholars and researchers from countries such as Australia and New Zeeland.
The author also highlights that some academics interested in exploring these fields tend to
operate from the traditions of linguistic or social anthropology, multimodality, pragmatics, and
interactional sociolinguistics (Cotter, 2015). Based on this, the three main approaches to media
discourse are revealed, mentioning the first as "discourse analytic", which addresses issues at the
discourse level related to broader sections of conversation and text beyond the word or sentence
level. The second as "sociolinguistic", which refers to work that involves variation and style in the
media or a similar close analysis of language along with socially motivated processes of
standardization and prescription. And the third and last as "non-linguistic", which involves work in
paradigms of political science, media studies, cultural studies, history or communication studies.

The approaches mentioned above involve critical, pragmatic, narrative, intercultural, and cognitive
discourse approaches. Characterizing the critical one, or also referred to in the chapter as
“critical / corpus / multimodal”, as critical in the sense of considering social impact or inequality, or
referring to political economy in the sense of the social value of language, without aligning
necessarily with an important tradition such as Critical Discourse Analysis. In speaking of pragmatic
discourse (also known as narrative / pragmatic / stylistic), Cotter mentions that a good deal of
research by linguists has focused on elements and explanations at the discourse level in relation to
the narrative structure of news; the pragmatic functions of discourse; discussions about
presentation and perspective, style and register; and questions of interaction and response of the
audience to the texts (Cotter, 2015). Providing great attention to the general structure of the
journalistic discourse. In ethnographic discourse (also known as anthropological/practice-focused),
it is mentioned that it is characterized by analyzing aspects of the situated practices of news
reporters and editors, or their implications of the community of practice and aiming at a holistic
reading of the discourse of the media (Cotter, 2015). The author also talks about comparative or
cross-cultural discourse and cognitive discourse, commenting that in the former the researchers
reveal an important understanding of the role of culture and politics in the production of news
discourse, as well as delineating the variable aspects of the news practice that is not evident in
treatments exclusively focused on Anglo-American media, including topic, citation restrictions, and
honorifics. And in the second and last, he mentions that cognitive methods, whether in relation to
understanding or other aspects of mental structure, seek to reveal the relationships between
cognitive processes, social meaning and discourse (Cotter, 2015).

Cotter highlights that there are three key components of media discourse; the news story (or the
spoken or written text), the process involved in the production of the texts and the alignments to
audiences. He defines them as key components since, in the first, the text encodes values and
ideologies that impact and reflect the world in general. In the second, the most recent research
details how factors in the production process significantly influence and define the discourse of
the news. And in the third and final, it is anchored in Bell's (1991) audience design framework and
accommodation theory, which involves consideration of audience and the various social and
linguistic meanings that are attached as a result.

From these three components, Cotter develops two of these concepts in greater depth, relating
them closely to the discourse in the media. In this way, he divides his ideas between "text
dynamics" and "audience consideration". Mentioning that in the first there are two important
points of view about the texts in the discourse in the media; the structure of the speech or
linguistic function and the impact as a speech carrier of ideology or representation of the social
world (Cotter,). In the second important idea, he comments that attention to the audience is the
first step away from the analysis of the media focused only on the text.

The author states that discourse-level analysis also works to identify the key characteristics and
behaviors of the language of the news, laying the foundations to delve into the concepts of
"narrative structure", "style and register" and "historical context, continuity, and change". In the
narrative, he mentions that the writing of the news allows us to know the motivations behind the
journalists. The superficial simplicity of the writing rules and the complexity of its results became
an object of further study and analysis with the process of writing and text. Regarding style and
registration, he mentions that style becomes a key feature of registration and informational
language. In addition to having a dynamic role for many speeches or practice communities in the
production of discourse. Finally, in terms of historical context, continuity, and change; Cotter
refers to the idea that journalists' own perceptions of their roles in the public sphere and their
changing job duties also influence style and speak to the dynamic construction of media identities,
and to the idea that changes in technology itself influence the discourse of the media at the same
time that they offer the researcher the opportunity to consider the stability (or intractability) of
cultural categories, and not only in the current digital age (Cotter, 2015).

Separately, Cotter adds that the media data also enriches the examination of more traditional
discourse parameters, underlining the problems of discourse multifunctionality, challenging
received analytical assumptions, and demonstrating what is unique in the language of the media.
(Cotter, 2015).

Finally, Cotter includes some ideas for possible future research within the field of discourse in the
middle. Here he mentions that news texts are not automatically assumed as the result of a
discursive process that comprises key communicative routines and practice habits that function to
constitute the journalistic or social community. Therefore, the way is clear to work even more in a
field of academic endeavor that, taken as a whole, incorporates and embraces research
orientations from a wide variety of disciplines. The author also mentions that it would be useful to
look at the role of the audience in relation to the practitioner, news production sites and
dissemination within the broader context of the local and global community, as well as the text,
posing some questions that could work as key questions to future research; What is the role or
position of the audience from the professional's point of view? And how does this influence the
creation and content of the informational text? How does it affect the structure of the discourse,
the choice of style, syntax or phonology? Who is the practitioner writing for? (Cotter, 2015). A
deeper understanding of the professional's focus on their readers or audience would allow for a
more nuanced discussion of media practice and its relationship to the audience or communities
covered. Also, it posits that it would do well to investigate further the range and scope of
journalism practice and process through community-based research, and on non-institutional
online blog posts and newsletters, as they are becoming central to consumption and therefore for
research scrutiny, such as new genres and forms of presentation, along with changes in
participation (Cotter, 2015).

To conclude, this chapter addresses a variety of works that consider the discourse in the medium
from various points of view, examining many aspects of the discourse structure, representation
and participation with the audience and society, in addition to the analysis of the fundamentals
and developments in media discourse research. It delves into key approaches and components of
discourse in the media, which have an important influence on the main topic of the paper
(discourse in the medium), and which allow us to better characterize and understand how the
discourse works and how it develops in different means of communication, allowing the author's
objective in the introduction to be achieved, and that the main points of his analysis and ideas
become understandable for the reader.

REFERENCES

Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton, Deborah Schiffrin. (2015). The Handbook of Discourse

Analysis: Chapter 37; Discourse and Media. UK: Wiley-Blackwell.