Agency In The British Press

This book examines the ways in which the 2011 UK riots were reported by the British press, by analysing the linguistic construal of the main participants involved in the protests and their agency. Starting from the assumption that newspapers do not just mirror reality, but rather construct it in discourse through a series of linguistic, stylistic and editorial choices, great attention is paid to how the events were portrayed according to different political, social and cultural stances. Since the linguistic labels employed by the newspapers to identify (and connote) the protagonists of the riots are indicative of their ideological positions, such critical attention to the specialised language of the press proves to be extremely noteworthy. Indeed, the urban unrest that periodically occurs, in the UK as much as within the wider European context, signals governments’ failure to deal with persisting social and economic problems. In this regard, investigating the extent to which the media manage or fail to account for the issues that are at the heart of such violent protests, while shaping public opinions, represents an interesting and rewarding endeavour.A corpus of about 1,700 articles, collected from the six British newspapers with the highest circulation rates in August 2011 (Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Sun, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Times), is therefore analysed with a corpus-based discourse analysis approach, combining qualitative and quantitative techniques. The linguistic depictions of the main social actors – Mark Duggan, the rioters, and the police – reveal the ideological burden affecting power relations between (élite or minority) groups within society.

International news-agencies, such as Reuters, the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse, have long been ‘unsung heroes’ of the media sphere. From the mid-nineteenth century, in Britain, the US, France and, to a lesser extent, Germany, a small number of agencies have fed their respective countries with international news reports. They informed governments, businesses, media and, indirectly, the general public. They helped define ‘news’. Drawing on years of archival research and first-hand experience of major news agencies, this book provides a comprehensive history of the leading news agencies based in the UK, France and the USA, from the early 1800s to the present day. It retraces their relations with one another, with competitors and clients, and the types of news, information and data they collected, edited and transmitted, via a variety of means, from carrier-pigeons to artificial intelligence. It examines the sometimes colourful biographies of agency newsmen, and the rise and fall of news agencies as markets and methods shifted, concluding by looking to the future of the organisations.

Mick Temple offers an introduction to the history, theory, politics and potential future of British newspapers.

Critically examines the agency and history of long-silenced coolie women and their role in colonial economy and transnational movements.

From 1941 to 1975, as a series of military conflicts gripped Asia and the Pacific, Australian journalism was dominated by war reporting from the region. Torney-Parlicki (history, U. of Melbourne) argues that the reporting went beyond the usual discussion of military strategy and, in an important way.