Description
Book Synopsis News stories provide an essential confirmation of our ideas about who we are, what we have to fear, and what to do about it: a marketplace of ideas, shopped by rational citizen decision makers but also a shared resource for grounding our contested narratives of identity in objective reality. News as a fundamental social process comes into being not when an event takes place or when a report of the event is created but when that report becomes news to someone. As it moves off the page into the community, news discovers - through its interpretations - its reality in the lives of the consumers. This book explores the path of news as it moves through the tangled labyrinth of social identities and asserted interests that lie beyond the page or screen. The language and communication-oriented study of news promises a salient area of investigation, pointing the way to an expansion, if not a redefinition of basic anthropological ideas and practices of ethnography, participant observation, and “the field” in the future of anthropological research.
Trade Review “...Extensively referenced, this is a book for communication theorists and anthropologists.” · Choice
“…an intriguing read which can broaden the perception of the news media and stir class debates as well as suggest further academic research…[It] is a complex academic work…[offering] suitable and inspiring reading for postgraduate students and scholars.” · Media, Culture & Society
Table of Contents Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. News and the Anthropology of Conflict Communication
Chapter 2. The Dark Side of the News: News as Control Communication
Chapter 3. Two Theories of News: The Civic Model and the Conflict Discourse Systems Model
Chapter 4. The News Act: News Analysis and Semiotic Theory
Chapter 5. News and Law as Conflict Communication Systems
Chapter 6. News in Extra-Textual Terrain
Chapter 7. Policy Talk: In Law, the Street, and on Television
Chapter 8. Order, Disorder, and the News Media in Western Society: Whose Side are they On?
Works Cited
Figures 1, 2, and 3
Index
