A brief presentation of background information on the free press and how it relates to a demand for objectivity is followed by a detailed discussion and criticism of some ideologically inspired approaches to the media as 'organizers of ideological production'. To illustrate relevant research issues, a picture is presented of the way in which the Soviet and American verbal behavior constituting the core of the political communicative event known as the U-2 incident (May 1960) was described in The New York Times. A functional analysis is given of the metapragmatic framing of the communicative exchange, with special attention to the use of metaphorical expressions.