An exploration of the signifying practices of a variety of media through textual analysis. The authors draw on recent linguistic work to sharpen and clarify our sense of the way in which meanings are produced in texts, and they attempt to show how specific textual features may be understood to invoke `extra-textual' cultural relations of ideology and power. They argue that media journalism often operates with binary oppositions such as 'us vs. them', or 'home vs. foreign'.