I came across the following publication when looking into semioligical systems in relation to the media as it was noted in the essay feedback tutorial that I should look at the newspaper front covers in more depth.
Hartley, J. (1982) Understanding News, London, Methuen & Co. Ltd
Some quotes:
"Speech, then, is the means by which we select and organise our experience, and it is the medium through which we learn how to behave, how to react, what to believe." p.1
"Speech isn't something over which we have individual control - it is supplied to us a ready made tool by other people." p.1. This could be applied to the section when I begin to analyse the media as a whole and its platform for social control.
"Our submission to the social control of the language-sytem is usually both voluntary and taken for granted." p.2.
"We identify strongly with certain language-systems, and seek to present ourselves in their terms." p.2.
"News comes to us as the pre-existing discourse of an impersonal social institution which is also an industry. As we get used to its codes and conventions we will become 'news-literate'." p.5.
"The way news is produced, what it concentrates on, how its stories are put together and who takes an interest in it, all depend to some extent on the habits and conventions - not to mention technology - which were developed in a previous historical period." p.8.
"The news is a social institution and a cultural discourse which exists and has meaning only in relation to other institutions and discourses operating at the same time." p.9.
"The corporations and capitalists who own the means of news production can mount campaigns, of exposure and investigation, or of war-mongering and witch-hunts, which help to alter the political or social direction of a country." p.9.
