ABSTRACT

In this chapter, we outline a set of ‘critical approaches’ to media analysis by looking specifically at how the language of the media has been approached within the research tradition currently described as Critical Discourse Studies (CDS). Since its inception in the late 1980s as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), CDS has come to be practiced very widely and has established itself in recent years as a recognized interdisciplinary approach in (critical) social as well as media analysis. CDS’s core interest remains in how language – most commonly defined via the central concept of discourse – changes, as well as controls and shapes, contemporary society, including through the power of (mass- and self-)mediated texts. While doing so, CDS deploys critical thinking, language- and text-oriented analysis and draws extensively on interdisciplinarity. It has placed linguistics –and language-oriented text-based studies of different types – at the center of social and, in particular, media research.