According to its editors, this book attempts “to map out a fresh approach to language in the media” (p. 3). Specifically, it is concerned with (a) the language used in media texts to talk about language itself, and (b) the language used by producers or consumers when discussing those texts, and how the two help to construct our understanding of language.
The book is divided into four sections. John Heywood & Elena Semino open “Metaphors and meanings” by outlining British press metaphors for communication, and consider the implications of those that oversimplify or sensationalize the speech acts they describe. Lesley Jeffries also focuses on British newspapers in her analysis of journalists’ constructions of a prototypical apology in their deconstruction (and rejection) of Tony Blair’s Iraq intelligence “apology.” Jane Hill then turns our attention to U.S. media, whose personalist handling of moral panics often benefits powerful elites by focusing on intention rather than outcome.
Section 2, “National identities, citizenship and globalisation,” moves to western Europe, beginning with Sally Johnson’s multimodal analysis of a Der Spiegel front cover and its invocation of national identity in the context of Germany’s spelling reform debate. Tommaso Milani examines press coverage of motions to introduce language testing to the naturalization process in Sweden, finding a reliance on presuppositions that misrepresent migrants and the links between language and citizenship. Kristine Horner closes the section by highlighting sociolinguists’ increasing focus on language ideologies and considers their intertwining with nationalist ideologies in Luxembourgish print media.
Section 3 turns to broadcast media and multilingualism, starting with Alexandra Jaffe’s analysis of Corsican television and radio’s handling and construction of multilingualism, and the way audiences react to dominant and minority registers. Focusing on code-switching and the extremes of competence and status in a radio satire, Helen Kelly-Holmes & David Atkinson consider how Ireland’s media talk in, and about, the Irish language, before Simon Gieve & Julie Norton offer an insightful (and useful) framework for analyzing television and apply it to identify strategies used in British programming to deal with conversations between native and non-native speakers.
Section 4, “Youth, gender and cyber-identities,” includes analyses concerned with new media, ranging from Crispin Thurlow’s examination of English-language newspaper discourse about “Generation Text” and the anxious condemnation of young people’s use of new media on linguistic and moral grounds; through Deborah Cameron’s look at surprisingly essentialist weblog responses to a piece of software that claims to determine an author’s gender using linguistic factors; to Astrid Ensslin’s theoretical framework for approaching aesthetic metalanguage, which she puts to work on the online phenomenon of hyperpoetry.
The book closes with an essay from Adam Jaworski considering some of the fundamental notions thrown out by the preceding chapters and that unite them; centrally, discourses suggestive of (more) authentic linguistic practices and the marginalization of others. In sum, this collection includes some interesting data approached from various starting points, yet remains coherent and largely accessible throughout: a useful guide to this emerging field of enquiry.
