Shaped By Audience Design

(1) INTRODUCTION

The focus of my dissertation is to find out to what extent television news programmes differ in relation to audience design, that is, how they use different linguistic styles to appeal to their respective audiences. What Fairclough (1991) terms as ‘niche audiences’. Language is tailored with a particular audience in mind, as Bell (1991) pointed out that the audience is usually the most important factor in choice of language style; “The essence of style is that … speakers are often primarily responding to their audience in the language they produce … the audience are arguably the most important and certainly the most researched component of mass communication … communicators do work with an idea of the audience they are speaking to and what they want” (Bell, 1991).