In recent decades, say Jean Aitchison and Diana M. Lewis in their introduction to this volume, the media have seen an unprecedented amount of change. New media modes have appeared; newspapers and radio have been joined by television and the Internet. The speed of transmission has increased, and many more readers/viewers participate both actively and passively in the ongoing process that is the dissemination and consumption of news.

Yet while a flood of publications has attempted to analyze the changing nature of the media – exploring underlying aims and attitudes, or examining ways in which the media might be misleading its readers/viewers – relatively few, Aitchison & Lewis say, have investigated the language of the media in any depth.

This volume arose out of a conference at the University of Oxford in April 2001 on “Language, the Media and International Communication.” Contributors include academics and some journalists, and the aim is to explore present-day media language, how it has changed or is changing, and how this affects our view of the world.

The 20 contributions are grouped under four topics. Part 1, “Modern media discourse,” looks at how media communication has changed in recent years; part 2, “Modes of the media,” deals with the variety of media modes through which the news is disseminated; part 3, “Representations and models,” looks at how the ways in which particular topics are represented can influence the perceptions of the audience; and part 4, “The effect of the media on language,” looks at ways in which the media might be affecting our everyday speech and even written records.

Although each section has a separate main theme, certain key points recur throughout the book, Aitchison & Lewis suggest. They single out two trends or “paradoxes” in particular. The first concerns what they call “globalisation versus fragmentation.” News reports now leap across the globe in seconds, they say – a phenomenon that has resulted in some similarities in media styles across widely separated geographical regions. In some cases, however, the reverse has happened, they write: “The immensity of the world has led to a tightening of small-scale networks, resulting in some fragmentation, as people try to maintain local ties and their own identity.”

The second paradox they note is that of linguistic expansion versus language compression. Extended reporting of major events is now the norm. Column inches have increased, newspaper pages multiplied; TV reports can now be accessed 24 hours a day. Yet at the same time, compression of information has become a major feature, with headlines summarizing a whole event in a few words, and dense noun phrases packing a variety of descriptive acts into a very few words. This is a powerful observation in itself.

The book's first section deals with how media communication has changed. Allan Bell's contribution looks at the media reporting of two similar events separated in time by almost 100 years: the expeditions to the South Pole of Robert Falcon Scott (1910 to 1913) and of Pete Hillary (1998 to 1999). Bell notes interesting similarities – pride in the achievement of national heroes, and the way in which headlines and the desire for a scoop drive the news agenda – but equally interesting differences. By the close of the 20th century, with the advent of 24-hour TV news coverage, reporting of events is almost real-time, and it is dominated by images rather than words. It is also more voyeuristic – with the waiting wives under much closer scrutiny – and there has been a shift away from relying on official versions of what happened to first-hand accounts. There is also, however, amongst the plethora of images and interviews, evidence of linguistic compression, especially in headlines.

Elsewhere in the book's opening section, journalist Raymond Snoddy examines a number of widespread beliefs about the media, such as that newspapers are doomed to collapse with the growing dominance of TV and the Internet, or that English will become the dominant language on the Internet and elsewhere. He concludes that they are largely groundless myths. Deborah Cameron suggests that certain discourse styles – such as an appearance of friendliness and informality – have spread through the media of different cultures, even when separate languages are used. Robin Lakoff asks whether political and other types of public discourse have grown less civil, concluding that what many call “incivility” is actually no more than the exuberance of certain groups, such as Blacks, women, and the non-middle classes, who have achieved “discourse power” for the first time. Finally, Martin Conboy investigates the language of the tabloid press and the development of a vernacular idiom through which the world is compressed into oversimple conceptual and linguistic categories.

In part 2, the emphasis shifts onto the various modes of the modern media, and how these affect the way in which media discourse is realized. John Carey looks at similarities and differences between newspaper reporting, general reportage, and literature, and concludes that in a sense, reportage is the modern successor to religion. “Arguably the advent of mass communications represents the greatest change in human consciousness that has taken place in recorded history,” he says (58). “The development, within a few decades, from a situation where most of the inhabitants of the earth would have no knowledge about how most of the others were faring, to a situation where the ordinary person's mental space is filled with reports about the doings of complete strangers, represents a revolution in mental activity … If we ask what took the place of news reporting in pre-modern man's brain, the likeliest answer … is religion.” David Hendy looks at the UK's BBC Radio Four, its struggles to achieve a “middlebrow” voice, and the BBC's recognition that it is not always possible to bridge the gulf between an elite and a popular voice. Angela Kessler and Alexander Bergs examine love letters sent by text messaging, and deny that they constitute a threat to literacy. Naomi S. Baron looks at “e-style” (e-mail style) and shows how it overlaps with and differs from existing discourse modes; it resembles speech, she concludes, but that is in part because writing in general has become more “speechlike” in response to changing social attitudes: and so what? Diana M. Lewis herself, finally, argues that digital modes of communication (essentially “online news”) are shaping a new discourse of news reporting – one that, because the Internet is so open to access by individuals, will be less dominated by the traditional mass media as more and more individuals find their voices.

In the opening contribution to part 3, the wine writer Malcolm Gluck takes a light-hearted look at the language of wine snobbery. Alan Partington examines the often acrimonious rules of engagement between White House “spin doctors” (official spokespersons) and the “wolf pack” (the press) and concludes that spin is little more than a new name for an old game. Jennifer M. Wei describes the metaphors used in news coverage of recent Taiwanese elections, a chapter interesting both for being a study of a non-English language media, and for what her study reveals about the different types of metaphors commonly employed in different cultures. Nuria Lorenzo-Dus examines how former BBC television talk-show host Robert Kilroy-Silk was able, by clever control of conversation and the use of specific questions, prompts, and evaluations, to ensure that traditional family and parenting attitudes were communicated through his show even though it appeared that participants were offering their own views. Catherine Evans Davies subjects U.S. media celebrity Martha Stewart to a similar examination.

The final part of the volume focuses on the way in which the media affect our language. Yibin Ni looks at the use of noun phrases in editorials and news reports. Douglas Biber examines how space constraints in newspapers have led to dense, structurally complex noun phrases which cram in information. John Ayto looks at the importance of newspapers in determining which neologisms find their way into modern dictionaries. John Simpson also attends to linguistic sources of data for dictionaries, this time specifically the Oxford English Dictionary. Jean Aitchison examines the media language used to describe the events of 11 September and concludes that few neologisms were coined during attempts to capture the horror of the incident, with reports falling back instead on existing words such as apocalypse, cataclysm and outrage. “The overwhelming final feeling of man is that words are unable to do justice to the emotions aroused by the events,” she concludes (202).

A collection of essays examining the ways in which the language of the media is changing to keep pace with new technologies, new modes of discourse, changing social norms, and the shift in relationship between formerly dominant mass media modes and an increasingly active audience is to be welcomed. Some contributions are necessarily of more worth than others (I particularly appreciated Robin Lakoff's contribution on the essential civility of incivility), and any specialist dipping into a volume as diverse and wide-ranging as this will inevitably encounter areas of work with which he or she is unfamiliar, and perhaps frustratingly little in terms of a solid contribution to his or her own specialized field. Taken as a whole, however, the volume is a significant contribution to the study of the changing nature of the media, and to the way in which the language employed in media discourse both influences and is influenced by the changing world the media is attempting to realize. It could serve as an invaluable introduction for anyone comparatively new to the field; for those with a longer record, it suggests several exciting new avenues for further research.