Investigating the Press Reform Debate

Binakuromo Ogbebor

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37265-1_5

Abstract

AbstractThe author uses a combination of content and critical discourse analyses to investigate how the media covered the press reform debate that arose from the News of the World phone hacking scandal and the Leveson Inquiry. A total of 870 news articles on the media reform debate from six British national newspapers were examined. Based on her findings, the author argues that the public needs to play a greater and more pragmatic role in ensuring press accountability. Also, in this chapter, the terms “metacoverage”, “metajournalistic discourse” and “journalistic metadiscourse” are defined and critically analysed to clarify their usage in academic literature. The chapter also explores the use of paradigm repair strategies in the coverage of media policy. Overall, the research was designed to produce empirical data on the representation of media policy.

Highlights

In the term “journalistic metadiscourse”, the “meta” or “self- referential” status is conferred on “journalism”, that is, journalism about journalism, but in Carlson’s conceptualisation of metajournalistic
Franklin (1997, cited in Frost 2007) breaks this self-perception down into six norms which are journalism is a quest for truth, journalism is independent of government, newspapers are pluralistic organisations, journalists are independent of economic pressures, journalists are watchdogs and journalism creates a public sphere with the bottom line being that journalism is central to democracy
This chapter presented the method used for my investigation into how the media represented the debate that arose from the News of the World phone hacking scandal and the Leveson Inquiry

Summary

Introduction

In the term “journalistic metadiscourse”, the “meta” or “self- referential” status is conferred on “journalism”, that is, journalism about journalism, but in Carlson’s conceptualisation of metajournalistic. In line with Carlson’s argument for the use of the notion of paradigm repair to study synecdoche deviancy in journalistic metadiscourse, Thomas and Finneman (2014) used paradigm repair to study the media coverage of the Leveson Inquiry, an offshoot of the phone hacking scandal

Results

Conclusion