When I was growing up in England in the 1960s, my after-school evenings were framed by two television broadcasts: the early evening news at 6 p.m. and the late evening news at 9 p.m.. Without fail, supper and homework followed the early news; and bedtime followed the late news. To my schoolboy mind, the content of the news did not really matter; it was the ritualized nature of the program watching, marking key passages of time in my daily routine, that counted most.

Two of the key questions tackled here are as follows: How is the world constructed for an audience by the media? How are far-away, sometimes frightening, events domesticated and packaged for television consumption? Montgomery borrows heavily from linguistic theory, particularly discourse analysis, to support his claims. The result is a comprehensive examination of broadcast news featuring tree diagrams, interview transcripts, frame-by-frame tableaux, and a persuasive textual analysis of typical news programs broken down into their various component parts.

This work succeeds brilliantly in its purported aim of examining mainstream television news broadcasts through the lens of discourse analysis. However, by the end, I was left with three remaining questions (perhaps to be tackled in a sequel): To what extent are these broadcast strategies and conventions uniform across all languages and cultures? To what extent have satirists such as Ali G. and Stephen Colbert opened up the genre of broadcast news by subverting protocol in their deliberately outrageous (and highly popular) television shows? To what extent have new media (driven mainly by the Internet) challenged—and possibly superseded altogether—mainstream news broadcasts? For example, I no longer measure out my evenings according to television news broadcasts. In fact, by the time evening comes along, I have already been presented with so much information on my computer (thanks to text crawls, daily blogs, video sharing, etc.) that I rarely turn on the television in the first place.