Journalism and public relations: A tale of two discourses

Van Dijk (1991) argues that it is from news that the majority of people obtain most of their social and political knowledge. Therefore, it should concern us that current research evidence suggests that the discourse of public relations is growing in influence over the discourse of journalism to an extent that journalists are relinquishing their agenda-setting function (Davies, 2008; Moloney, 2006). Using the concepts of intertextuality and genre, the form and content of examples of public relations material and the news stories which resulted from them are discussed. Erjavec’s (2005) method of comparative analysis is employed to examine the texts as well as discuss the discourse processes. Fairclough’s (1995) argument that texts are a set of options is used to show that the options journalists are choosing are not necessarily based on the accepted rules of news values (Galtung and Ruge, 1965).