Matheson’s book provides an accessible introduction to a discourse analytic approach to the media. It presumes no prior knowledge of the field and is clearly pedagogically oriented, including useful further reading lists at the end of each chapter, together with a 7-page glossary of basic terms.
After a general introduction pointing out the links between language and thought, discourse and ideology, Matheson provides eight chapters, each of which introduces a different analytic approach and illustrates it by applying it to a different type of medium. The reader is thus exposed to a wide range of media categories and a diversity of theoretical approaches. The data used in these eight chapters are drawn from news reports, advertisements, consumer magazines, television drama, reality television, broadcast interviews, sports commentary and blogs, and these are explored within the frameworks of critical linguistics, semiotics, transitivity analysis, narratology, visual discourse analysis, Conversation Analysis, social cognition theory, and interactivity analysis, respectively. Issues examined include the use of intertextuality in advertisements as a device for appealing to consumers, identity construction in magazines such as Cosmopolitan and FHM, the struggle for power between interviewer and interviewee, the implicit scripts underlying comments made in a Eurosport commentary on a World Cup football match, and the new kinds of interaction that have recently developed around the phenomenon of weblogs.
The book’s broad range necessarily means that the examination of each media category is fairly brief, and the various methodologies are likewise sketched rather than evaluated in depth. However, the broad overview offered will be invaluable to those wishing to get a feel for the kinds of topics addressed by media discourse analysts, and it will also help students to evaluate which approach is most suited to investigating a particular issue.
While clearly oriented toward the needs of students of language, communication, and media studies, the book may be of interest to a more general public. Many of the case studies presented are intrinsically interesting and relevant to any consumer of the media; the examination of racism in sports commentaries and the objectification of individuals that occurs on reality television are just two examples. The style is highly readable, with plenty of apposite examples, ranging from an advertisement for Diet Coke to a Jeremy Paxman interview. The material used shows a strong British orientation, but this does not mean the examples are not perfectly accessible to a wider audience.
In this book, then, Douglas Matheson has produced a stimulating and easily digested introduction to communication in the mass media, and readers may be inspired to explore the subject further by following the suggestions for further reading.
