Why do news values matter? Towards a new methodological framework for analysing news discourse in Critical Discourse Analysis and beyond

Abstract

This article introduces a new framework for the analysis of news discourse to scholars in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and beyond. It emphasises the importance of news values for linguistic analysis and encourages a constructivist approach to their analysis. The new methodological framework is situated within what the authors call a ‘discursive’ approach to news values. From this perspective, news values are seen as values that exist in and are constructed through discourse, and the primary research interest is in how texts construct newsworthiness through multimodal resources. This article first introduces resources that are used to construe news values in English-language news discourse, before illustrating the framework through two case studies of a 70,000-word corpus of British news discourse. The framework itself is intended for both multimodal discourse analysis and corpus linguistic analysis, although this article focuses more on the integration of corpus linguistic techniques. Thus, the discursive approach ties in well with two recent trends in CDA – towards multimodal and towards corpus-assisted discourse analysis. More specifically, the case studies show that corpus linguistic techniques can identify conventionalised discursive devices that are repeatedly used in news discourse to construct and perpetuate an ideology of newsworthiness. They further show that such techniques can provide a useful indication of the discursive construction of newsworthiness around a specific topic, event or news actor. The article concludes with an outline of further applications of the framework for (critical) linguistic analyses of news discourse.