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Article published In:
Popular News Discourse: American and British newspapers 1833-1988
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 15:2] 2014
► pp. 314–330

Popular newspaper discourse

The case of UK TV criticism from the 1950s to the 1980s

| Roehampton University

Journalistic discourse, the world over, has developed over time, reflecting changes in the news industry and the wider society. Likewise television criticism, a specific form of journalism, has also had to evolve over time. Initially, as television critics sought recognition and respectability in the quality newspapers, they developed a form of writing similar to the way other forms of culture and art were reviewed. However, as journalists began to develop more popular ways of writing, and with the spread of soft news throughout newspapers and into new magazine supplements, television critics also found themselves having to follow suit. This was such that by the 1970s a number of critics had moved away from trying to mimic other forms of reviewing or criticism to creating their own, more popular form of discourse. In this article I will explore some of the ways the language of critics changed between the 1950s and the 1980s, and how these developments were similar or different to the wider changes in journalism happening at this time.

Keywords: popular journalism, television criticism, critics, television critics
Published online: 21 July 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.15.2.08rix
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