A qualitative analysis of radio news in Australia

Abstract

This thesis examines the genre of radio news texts. It shows how latent meanings brought to bear on the outside world are mediated through radio news. Certain recurrent moral judgments is and political orientations are identified in a framework constructed by the radio network newsroom. The framework tends to confirm the respective audience's own ideological positions. In this process, the style of the news service is seen to be as important as its content. The method compares an extensive sample of the news texts of two Adelaide radio stations from two perspectives. Firstly, quantitative content analysis is applied to determine the selection of stories for news items. This indicates the different notions of newsworthiness that are being applied by the two newsrooms. It is shown that news bulletins regularly are patterned in a preferred order which provides the elements of a structure of interpretation of the world. Secondly, qualitative discourse analysis is used to elucidate the process of composition of news texts, to determine the meaning of the messages of the texts. A narrative and rhetorical method is developed to explicate the dimensions of the messages in terms of the formal characteristics of language, the content or themes, and the kind of reality presented.