Critical Discourse Analysis: Mass Media
Deti Anitasari
Department of English Education, Faculty of Teacher Training and Education, Universitas
Lancang Kuning
detianitas@gmail.com
ABSTRACT: In this paper, the researcher aims are to review some key problems of
approaches to research on mass media text from point of view discourse analytical and to
present an argument, as well as a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) structures for analysis
of mass media discourse. The researcher regards a number of areas of critical research
interest in mass media discourse locally and elsewhere. An instance of actual CDA
researches on mass media discourse is reviewed in terms of topics of obviously popular
interest among society, before listing methodological, as well as the topical plan by a main
support in the field for further work. This paper concludes that CDA’s multidisciplinary
approach helps to understand and aware of the hidden socio-political issues and agenda in
all kinds of areas of language as a social practice to empower the individual and social
groups.
Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse studies, Mass Media
Discourse, Media text Analysis
INTRODUCTION
Discourse has been explained as
structures and practices that reflect
human thought and social realities
through particular collections of words
and that simultaneously construct
meaning in the world (Fairclough, 2003).
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)
proposes a research methodology for
deconstructing discourses and fixed
power
relationship.
From
epistemological
standpoint,
it
presupposes the multiple possibilities of
knowing and interpreting the world
(Yanow, 2000. Through mass media we
could know about the world as well,
mass communication is a tools
communication between human, how
human talks to one another via verbal
and non-verbal means, but which
concerns messages that are essentially
transmitted through a medium (channel)
to reach a large number of people
(Wimmer & Dominick, 2012, Devito,
2011). From the beginning, for a clear
point of view on the problems relating to
mass media effects, it is helpful to
clarify what constitutes mass media in
current communication studies, i.e. “any
communication
channel
used
to
simultaneously reach a large number of
people, including radio, TV, newspapers,
magazines, billboards, films, recordings,
books, and the Internet as well as the
new category smart mass media, which
include Smartphone, smart TVs, and
tablets” (Wimmer & Dominick, 2012).
In this journal, the researcher
aims to review some key problems in
approaches to research on mass media
texts from point of view discourse
analytical and to present an argument, as
well as a Critical Discourse Analysis
(CDA) structure for analysis of mass
media discourse. The researcher regard a
number of areas of critical research
interest in mass media discourse locally
and elsewhere.
Regardless
of
mass
communication progress and associated
smart media technologies and related
media product over the years, it seems
that mass media research began to merge
with discourse. Therefore, van Dijk has
also used a mixture of content analysis
and discourse analytical categories or
structures and also deal with social
issues in mass media discourse and their
correlated socio-cultural and cognitive
aspect.
Therefore,
refocused
their
interest on the “(social, cultural, and
political) context and the ‘localization’
of meaning” (Wodak & Busch, 2004)
and also their well-known that more than
40% of the papers published in the
leading journal Discourse & Society are
based on media texts.
Furthermore, it had been argued
before that approaching mass media
studies from a paradigm-based vantage
was filled with speculations, more than
60% in the social science paradigm
compared with about 34% in the
interpretive paradigm and less than 6%
in the critical one) So, Potter et al.
(1993) concluded that even if the social
science paradigm can come out as the
majority
paradigm
in
normal
communication research journals, it
“could not be considered a dominant
paradigm in the research field” in
question. Possibly, as van Dijk (1996)
has noted, instead of focusing on the
effects of mass media from a
communication studies point of view,
discourse-oriented
research
could
consider “properties of the social power
of the media, not restricted to the
influence of the media on their
audiences, but which also involves the
role of the media within the broader
framework of the social, cultural,
political, or economic power structures
of society”.
In another place in the literature,
proponents of mass media analysis,
though with a clear focus on political
theory such as Carpentier and de Cleen
(2007), progress bringing discourse
theory into media studies. They concern
Laclau and Mouffe’s theories of
discourse, also hegemony and socialist
strategy (Laclau & Mouffe, 1987, 2001)
to fluent Discourse-Theoretical Analysis
(DTA), at that time they compare to
CDA but only to give in that “a
significant
number
of
valuable
contributions of DTA to media studies
can be found within CDA the standard
framework for analyzing media texts”
(Carpentier & De Cleen, 2007).
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Critical Media Analysis: An Overview
Discourse is language as a
subject and relates to expressing
ourselves through words in ways of
knowing the world. As theory and
research in functional linguistics have
shown, linguistic forms can be
systematically associated with social and
ideological functions (Halliday &
Matthiessen, 1994). Perhaps, more
importantly, discourses can also be used
to resist and critique such assertions of
power. CDA is the multidisciplinary
field of inquiry traditional approaches
such
as
conversation
analysis,
ethnography of communication and
interactional sociolinguistics.
The term “discourse” is a
complex
and
like
mammoth’s
interpretation.
Many earlier studies
mention the term discourse as very
ambiguous since its introduction to
modern discipline and many broad
interpretations of discourse, it refers to
the speech patterns and how language,
dialects, and acceptable statements are
used in a particular community.
Discourse as a subject of study looks at
discourse among people who share the
same speech conventions. Moreover,
discourse refers to the linguistics of
language use as a way of understanding
interactions in a social context,
specifically the analysis of occurring
connected speech or written discourse,
Dakowska (2001) in Hamuddin (2012).
Even though discourse also has
resources besides language that is
instantiated together as in mass media
texts such as multimedia texts, streaming
video, and related multimodal discursive
practices on the Internet (Kress & van
Leeuwen, 2001), language is the most
complex in the process of situated
meaning-making (“semiosis”) in the
social context of discourse production
and interpretation (Fairclough, 1989,
1995; Halliday & Matthiessen, 1994).
Basically, discourse is language in
context and relate to valuing, expressing
ourselves through words in ways of
knowing. As research and theory in
general functional linguistics have
shown, linguistic forms can be
systematically associated with social and
ideological functions (Halliday &
Matthiessen, 1994).
Van Dijk (1997) choose the term
CDS (Critical Discourse Studies), “a
new cross-discipline that comprises the
theory and analysis of text and talk in
virtually all disciplines of the humanities
and social science” CDA describes,
interprets, analyses, and critiques social
life (Luke, 1997) by studying “the
discursive practices of a community its
normal ways of using language”.
Structure of discourse is distinguished by
three levels of meaning namely Text,
Interaction and Context.
Text: The first aspect ‘discourse
as text’ purposes to learning the textual
features of discourses, that is ‘how is the
text designed, why it is designed in this
way, and how else could it have been
designed?’ (Fairclough,1995, p. 207). In
this level, the focus exploration more on
the formal features of the text such as
vocabulary, grammar syntax or specific
lexis, phrase, sentence, figures, images,
chart or a combination all of these
(multimedia).
Interaction:
Richard
Buchanan shares Davis’s broad analysis
of interaction. Interaction is a mode of
framing the relationship between people
and objects considered for them and thus
a way of framing the action of design.
Which is concerns the process of text
production and text interpretation.
Context: H.G. Widdowson,
while learning on language meaning,
thought “context” as “those aspects of
the circumstance of actual language use
which are taken as relevant to meaning.”
He added pointed out, “in other words,
context is a schematic construct...the
achievement of pragmatic meaning is a
matter of matching up the linguistic
elements of the code with the schematic
elements of the context.” (H.G.
Widdowson, 2000, p.126). In discourse,
this deals with the broader social and
cultural
conditions
of
discourse
production and interpretation.
Linguistic analysis of a text cover
up the traditional outline of linguistic
analysis such as semantics, vocabulary,
grammar, writing system analyses and
phonology
but
includes
textual
organization above the sentence such as
turn taking, generic structure and
cohesion. Mediating between the text
and social practice, the interpretation
stage of analysis involves the process of
text comprehension and is concerned
with the cognitive processes of
members. To conclude, the stage of
explanation covers the analysis of the
relationship between interaction and the
social context of production and
interpretation (Fairclough, 2001). It is
related to dissimilar levels of abstraction
of an event: the immediate, situational
context, and institutional practices the
event is embedded in (Fairclough, 1995,
2001).
From the centrality of discursive
strategies in Wodak’s DHA, there are
four macro strategies of discourse for the
analysis of national identities that is
destructive strategies, transformational
strategies, constructive strategies and
perpetuating strategies. Added, in
analyzing text to national identity or
nationhood, discursive approach may be
based on four key questions:
1) From what perspective or points
of view are these naming,
attributions and arguments
expressed? (perspective
strategies)
2) What qualities, characteristics
and features are attributed to
them? (predicational strategies)
3) How are persons named and
referred to linguistically?
(referential strategies)
4) By means of what arguments do
specific persons or social groups
try to justify and legitimate the
discrimination and exploitation
of others? (argumentation
strategies)
By attention to the illustration of
groups and the social relations between
them, van Dijk’s approach is helpful for
analysis of news discourses to study the
socio-ideological illustration of “Us vs.
They”. Van Dijk (2001) begins his
analytical approach with topics or
“semantic macrostructures”, which he
argues, provide an initial overall idea of
what a discourse or corpus of texts is all
about, and controls many other aspects
of discourse and its analysis (p.102) after
that,
he
analyses
local
or
“microstructures” for the meaning of
words (lexical), the structures of
propositions, and coherence and other
relations between propositions (p.103).
Then, at the “meso” level like mediating
between global and local meanings, he
classifies an overall strategy of ‘positive
self-presentation and negative other
presentation’, in which our good things
and their bad things are emphasized, and
our bad things and their good things are
de-emphasized (p.103).
As can be seen, the general
values of CDA, which are agreed
between the socio cognitive and the
socio critical approaches, as follow:
1) Discourse constitutes society and
culture in a dialectical relationship
2) CDA addresses social problems
3) The link between text and society
is mediated through discourse
4) Discourse is a form of social action
From above values reflect the
varied ways in which discourse works
and when appropriated by the powerholders in society, principally the state
and/or those who control the mass
media, it serves to pass unequal power
relations and representations of social
groups, appearing to be ordinary sense,
usual, and normal when in fact there is
intrinsic prejudice, injustice and social
discrimination.
Bridging CDA And The Media
In current years, with the discuss
on globalization as “the principal frame
of reference when we try to explain
economic, new political and cultural
phenomena and the spread of the
Internet, media and communication are
ascribed a significant part in the
processes of change” (Hjarvard, 2003).
Even a brief expression on how the array
of mass media channels listed at the
beginning of this paper impacts people’s
lives will bear testimony to our massmediated world and the emergence of
the network society (Castells, 2000,
2011).
Wodak and Busch (2004) have
noted, in CDA, media are images of
public space and may be studied as sites
of social power and struggle, mainly in
terms of the language of the mass media:
“Language is often only apparently
transparent. Media institutions often
purport to be neutral, in that they provide
space for public discourse, reflect states
of affairs disinterestedly, and give the
perceptions and arguments of the
newsmakers” (p.110), while they often
have hidden sociopolitical agenda that
lie at the heart of the matter (e.g.
Gamson, Croteau, Hoynes, & Sasson,
1992; Herman & Chomsky, 2008;
Miller, 2004). Main problems that are
appropriated in the outline include
capitalism, racism, nationalism, identity
politics, antisemitism and war reporting.
Some areas of CDA research in relation
to the mass media and related examples
are outlined below.
News of War
Critical discourse analysis (CDA)
brings the critical tradition in social
analysis into language studies, and
contributes to critical social analysis a
particular focus on discourse, and
relations between discourse and other
social elements.
In the mass media has war
reporting to analyzed using the CDA
approach. Davies (2007) analyzed a
Sunday Mirror news report of the
February 2003 demonstration in London
against the Iraq war as branch of a larger
study of the textual generation of
oppositional pairs in news reports in the
UK national press. He find out much
quoted response by George Bush to the
attack on the World Trade Centre in
2001, “Either you are with us or with the
terrorist’ combine rhetorically to
construct groups of protesters as
acceptable and unacceptable’ ” (pp.7173). Davies disagree that even though
Bush had used “either”, he employed “us
and terrorist” unusually rather than “us
and them” in seeking to unite America
and the rest of the world “against a
common enemy” leaving no possibility
of a middle way” (Davies,2007)
In another hand, patterns of press
discourse in the after effects of the
Persian Gulf War (1990- 1991) appeared
to give broad insights into “America’s
`master narrative’ of war, a narrative
which had been threatened by the
Vietnam experience” (Hackett & Zhao,
1994). To show how the state apply the
mainstream media to promote its own
interests, Kellner (1992) look into “a
classic case of media manipulation” that
showed that the Bush administration had
secretly released disinformation to the
press “to legitimate sending U.S. troops
and to mobilize public support for this
action”. In the consequent period of the
war, the media became a tool for U.S.
policy, “privileging those voices seeking
a military solution to the conflict” (p.57).
Generally, other than working
with online news reports that might be
found on their editorial pages (see for
e.g., Sani, Abdullah, Ali, & Abdullah,
2012a; Sani, Abdullah, Ali, & Abdullah,
2012b), CDA work has dealt with social
media and networking sites such as
Facebook (Eisenlauer, 2013), radio and
television, as well as their associated
genres. Look, for example, Chouliaraki’s
(2004) analysis of footage on television
of the September 11th attacks in New
York. Further, while the general focus of
critical analysis is based on the study of
linguistic features of media texts, and
images are treated as “visual language”
(Fairclough, 2001), i.e. often analyzed as
if they were linguistic text (Jørgensen &
Phillips, 2002, p.61), Kress and van
Leeuwen’s (Kress & van Leeuwen,
2001, 2006) work in critical social
semiotics has served to elucidate visual
features via multimodal discourse
analysis (see also Lemke, 2004; Machin
& Mayr, 2012).
News of Capitalism
An additional area of research on
mass media discourse is as well as major
in CDA and “which illustrates the
mediating and constructing role of the
media” (Wodak & Meyer, 2009) in neocapitalist, neoliberal discourses have
been found by Fairclough. In this
reasonably new area of critical work, the
“language of the new capitalism”
(Wodak & Busch, 2004) submitted to
both the dominant global position of the
English language also to the language as
discourse of the globalization project
(Fairclough, 2001a). In both senses, neocapitalist language is linked to
discourses of modernization,
democratization, transparency etc., in a
sequence of similarity to the digitallynetworked k-economy characterized by
“time-space distanciation” as “an
extension in the spate-temporal reach of
power” in language use (Chouliaraki &
Fairclough, 1999).
Advertisement Language
Advertisements are generally
connected with the mass media of
magazine, newspaper, television, etc.,
the public also encounters them on
billboards, posters and in direct mail
(Rotzoll, 1985), not to talk about in
recent times on the ubiquitous Internet
web page. Bhatia (2004) statements that
advertisements as the “primary and most
dominant
form
of
promotional
discourse”
(p.89)
are
readily
appropriated via the mixing of genres.
For example, the South China Morning
Post carries a special weekly creation or
service evaluate called “Classified Plus”,
which in the mixed kind form such as
“an advertorial or a blurb has been
deceptively used as a recommendation or
a review, whereas in fact it is no
different from an advertisement” (p.91).
In the case of advertisements that
utilize multiple semiotic modalities
including linguistics text to make a
composite image of a preferred
representation, Machin and Mayr (2012)
promoter a social semiotics approach
based on the pioneering work of Kress
and van Leeuwen (2001). Even as
Machin and Mayr (2012) reminder that
“how much images can be described as
working like language the multimodal
discourse analysts’ claim has been
challenged”, they show how Kress and
van Leeuwen’s analytical toolkit utilized
together with CDA “does enhance our
ability to describe more systematically
what it is that we see” (p.8), taking the
typical text plus image “Easy-at-work
fitness
tips!”
advertisement
in
Cosmopolitan magazine targeting young
female office workers who need “fitness
tips for bikini body performance”
(Machin & Mayr, 2012). The study
shows that the image does not depict “a
real woman at work”, however rather
“one that symbolizes a particular kind of
lifestyle” to sell advertising space, and
the magazine, while distracting “the
reader from the absurdity of many of the
tips provided” (pp.9-10).
Language on Racism
Racist is a stigmatizing headword
and political fighting word that seem to
be on almost everyone’s lips today, there
is talk of a genetic, cultural, biological,
institutional and ethno pluralist. The
starting point of a discourse analytical
approach to the phenomenon of racism is
to realize that racism, as both social
practice and ideology, obvious itself
discursive. Van dijk reminders that
empirical research in many countries
have shown that “the media play an
important role in expressing and
spreading ethnic prejudice which is one
of the conditions of racist practices that
define racism as the social system of
ethnic power abuse”.
Definitely, Wodak and Busch
(2004) have underlined, the (written)
news kind has been most important in
CDA research on media including
journal editing and right-wing editorial
prejudice in newspapers and Wodak’s
own studies of nationalism, antiSemitism and neo-racism (Wodak, De
Cillia, Reisigl, & Liebhart, 2009).
Studies on the local scene that have
delved into racism, nationalist ideologies
and related practices in news media
include those by Abdullah (2004).
Outline of Current or Future
Research Areas
There are some list areas of
interest in CDA that constitue current
critical research according Wodak and
Meyer (2009) that perhaps linked to the
challenges and to socio political issues in
the media such as racism, globalization
and gender. Some of the areas essentially
cover up methodological issues even as
impinging to a lesser point on topical
interest, as follows:
1) Effects of new media and changed
concepts of space and time
2) New phenomena in our political
systems arising from local as well
global developments
3) Relationship between complex
historical processes ,hegemonic
narrative and CDA approaches
especially in the context of
identity politics
4) Effect of knowledge based
economy (KBE) on society and its
re-contextualization
CONCLUSIONS
The review here of real research
conducted using the approach, of course
incomplete but the researcher assume it
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capitalism, nationalism, identity politics,
racism and war reporting. Enlightenment
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