Evaluation in Media Discourse —— Analysis of a Newspaper Corpus

Media evaluation is the holy grail of public relations, both academic and in practice. Most tools currently in use are either unusefully cumbersome, or too rough to be beneficial. However, all tools except the very roughest, advertising value equivalence, rely on a human reader to make a qualitative judgement at some point. Monika Bednarek, in a hugely detailed analysis of a comparable set of newspapers, proposes a system of evaluation which relies on a set of dimensions which go considerably beyond anything which has been previously published in terms of depth and complexity. Her system, which gives a weighting to the vocabulary of the article in question offers the possibility of a truly objective system of analysis and classification. However, like Noam Chomsky's transformational grammar, Bednarek's model comes crashing down on the issue of semantics. Her analysis only examines what the article contains, not what it actually says. It is not too difficult to construct an article which would be marked up by her system as saying one thing, but to an ordinary reader would say the opposite. Although novel in the sense that she is applying this approach to media evaluation, Bednarek is doing nothing more than the analyses which have been applied since the 1970s to other kinds of texts by the statistical school of linguistics. This was devastatingly critiqued by Suzanne Romaine's Socio-historical Linguistics (1982), and Romaine's criticisms apply as much to Bednarek's work as to the studies she was directly attacking. Although fascinating to look back at a particular page of recent history through the eyes of many journalists, the book is ultimately futile, in that the system it proposes is more cumbersome to mark up than simply reading the articles and recording a judgement about them, and in that the conclusions it offers on a particular text are quite simply meaningless. Anybody who has played with machine translation, of the kind pioneered by Babelfish, will recognise that mechanical methods, whether operated through a computer or by a person following an algorithm, are not yet able to deduce the meaning of a text. However, this books proposes nothing more sophisticated than exactly such a mechanical method. A moment of reflection should make it clear that a system which attempts to evaluate media (or, indeed, do a GCSE English comprehension) without being able to analyse its meaning is doomed to failure. I paid full price for this book. I have to regretfully say that is makes no useful contribution.