For a postfoundational method to news discourse analysis

The construction of news is not haphazard. It is institutional in the sense it is a fundamental part of the content media organizations churn out in accordance with certain standards, styles, rules, and rituals. As such, organizational discourse, whether news or any other genre, according to Fairhurst (2009, p. 1608), would represent a constellation of perspectives united by the view that language does not mirror reality, but constitutes it. Thus news discourses organizations employ are a structured collection of texts embodied in the practices of talking and writing (as well as a wide variety of visual representations and cultural artefacts) that bring organizationally related objects into being as these texts are produced, disseminated and consumed. Phillips et al. (2004, p. 636) assert that the unravelling of social reality of an organization entails the systematic study of texts-including their production, dissemination, and consumption-in order to explore the relationship between discourse and social reality. This paper is an inquiry into the news discourse of a global, multilingual broadcaster with the aim of presenting a method on how to investigate news from a postfoundational discourse analysis perspective (henceforth PDA). Despite its popularity as a discourse analysis tool, PDA still suffers from a quite considerable methodological deficit. The paper demonstrates that the deficit PDA suffers from can be overcome with recourse to other approaches, specifically critical realist discourse studies (RDS). The following section presents an outline of the major tenets of PDA and then it shows how its combination with RDS can help remedy some of its shortcomings.

Automated summary

The construction of news is institutionalized and follows certain standards, styles, rules, and rituals. Organizational discourse, including news, is a collection of texts that do not merely reflect reality but constitute it. Investigating news from a postfoundational discourse analysis perspective has methodological challenges that can be overcome by incorporating critical realist discourse studies.