This article examines media discourse as a central mechanism through which media culture is formed and reproduced in the information society. The study is conceptual and draws on a comparative-analytical and hermeneutic reading of socio-philosophical theories of discourse, critical discourse analysis, and research on media discourse and the digital knowledge order. It starts from the threefold relation between language, power, and social reality: language reflects reality, shapes it, and serves as an instrument of control over it. On this basis, the article argues that the macro-historical level of discourse analysis, represented by Michel Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge, and its micro-practical level, represented by Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic power, are complementary rather than competing. Norman Fairclough’s descriptive, interpretive, and explanatory stages of analysis are then refined: the explanatory stage is directed toward identifying the elements of media culture that media texts reproduce, namely stereotypes, genre conventions, and the relation between dominant and alternative discourses. The article further demonstrates that the relation between the subjects of media discourse is unequal and that its two core social functions, shaping public opinion and transmitting values, rest on a mechanism of selection and exclusion that creates meaning also through what is left outside the text. In the digital environment, this selection passes from editorial offices to users and recommender algorithms, whose criterion is anticipated user response rather than justification. As a result, the order of what can be said is supplemented by an order of what is visible, and the subject responsible for selection disappears. The findings offer criteria for the critical analysis of media texts in journalism and humanities education and specify the discursive mechanism behind the fragmentation of the digital public sphere.
Levels of Discourse Analysis and The Disappearance of The Responsible Subject in Media Discourse
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