The language of news media By Allan Bell (review)

5% LANGUAGE, VOLUME 70, NUMBER 3 (1994) Kohler & Gabriel Altmann's paper on encoding and decoding meaning (173-90). As a group, these loosely connected articles provide further evidence of the key role the lexicon plays in language. A note regarding background information on contributing authors in a collection such as this: it may prove helpful to some readers to see not just the names of the individual authors but also the institutions they represent. This is especially important when the collection is the result of a colloquium that draws scholars from various parts of the world. In this particular case, for example, ten of the 17 articles are from Germany , six from various other European countries , and one from the U.S. But the languages in which the articles are written give a somewhat different picture: nine are in English, eight in German. Unless one is familiar with every author , it is not clear if all of them are based in Europe, or if some originated elsewhere and are working temporarily on projects overseas. Having such background information may contribute to a better understanding of particular schools of thought within global scholarship. [Elisabeth Haggblade, California State University , Fresno.] The language of news media. By Allan Bell. (Language in society, 16.) Oxford, UK, & Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991. Pp. xv, 277. Cloth $52.95, paper $18.95. Journalists and linguists both have a passion for language, but they work in different worlds with vastly different methods, time frames, and goals. Bell has drawn on his training and experience in both disciplines to provide linguists with an intelligent and helpful introduction to media language research. Ch. 1, 'Media and language' (1-8), defines the object of study as the language of the daily media (newspapers, radio, and television). Three main themes, present throughout the book, are introduced: (1) to understand a media text as a finished product, one must study it in light of the writing and editing processes by which an assembly line of news workers produce it; (2) news items are structured as narratives ; and (3) the audience, despite its apparent passivity, is an influential participant in media language. Ch. 2, 'Researching media language' (9-32), surveys the goals of previous media studies, discusses corpus collection, and offers linguists a friendly warning about the difficulty of gaining the cooperation of media organizations , who seldom appreciate scrutiny of their work. In Ch. 3, The production of news language' (33-55), B demonstrates its institutional nature, following a hypothetical news text around the world from its inception in B's New Zealand to its arrival in Buenos Aires. Ch. 4, 'Authoring and editing the news text' (56-83), describes how journalists compile articles, putting together spoken and written sources so that the multiple voices of journalist and newsmakers are transformed into a single text. B discusses how editors edit, deleting and substituting syntactic and lexical structures while trying to preserve meaning, and why editors edit—principally to make the most of the news value of a story, but also to fill in gaps, reduce redundancy, correct inaccuracies, and alter potentially ambiguous or libelous statements. Ch. 5, The audience for media language' (84-103), outlines a model for a media audience consisting of concentric circles of addressees, auditors, overhearers, and eavesdroppers, according to their distance from the intended target audience. B depicts media professionals as largely ignorant of their audience, and indifferent toward it, as they write for each other's esteem. In Ch. 6, 'Stylin' the news: Audience design' (104-25), he explores how radio and the press try to adapt oral and written language styles which correlate with the socioeconomic status of their target audiences, so that the same newscaster broadcasting on two different stations with different audiences may show different phonological and grammatical features . In Ch. 7, Talking strange: Referee design in media language' (126-46), B reports his own research on the use in New Zealand radio and television advertising of local and foreign varieties of English to establish different relationships between the advertiser and the audience. Ch. 8, Telling stories' (147-74), draws a parallel between the structure of news stories and the structure of personal narratives as...