Abstract:
Research by geographers on using news media in the classroom has tended to concentrate on either content or discourse analysis of newspapers. These approaches hold in common an implicit understanding that what news stories say happened is not as important as the language, metaphors, images and representations used in news stories. In this paper the author discuss Bell's (1999) approach to analysing news stories, which lies somewhere between content and discourse analysis. This approach works through emphasizing the ‘event’ and ‘time’ structure of stories as they are presented to us in newspapers. Through building up the ‘event’ and time structure of news stories about asylum we can put ourselves in a position to see what the story does—and does not—say. In turn this approach shows how our understandings of seemingly simple news stories are often based on assumptions, ambiguities and discrepancies that support and are based within exploitative power relationships.
