Mass media offer an illuminating site to examine the processes and effects of linguistic accommodation. This chapter first addresses general questions of mass communication and its relation to speech accommodation theory. It then examines one particular set of language data drawn from radio news broadcasts and its implications for the theory.

Mass communicators and their audience

Mass communication research shares with speech accommodation theory (SAT) an interest in the relation of communicators and their audiences. Much early media research had a disciplinary base in social psychology and was concerned with the effects of mass communication: What do media do to people? After decades of contradictory and inconclusive studies (see Howitt 1982), this question was turned around: What do people do with media? The “uses and gratifications” approach (e.g., Klapper 1960) waned, and interest in the communicator and communication content – always present but often overshadowed by the popular and political focus on media effects – has predominated in research. The many current approaches include the sociology of knowledge (e.g., Tuchman 1978), organizational sociology (Burns 1977), and textual and cultural studies (Glasgow University Media Group 1980).

Mass communication is structurally different from face-to-face communication. It involves a disjunction of place, and often also of time, between communicator and audience. This fracture in the communication process has significant consequences for language production. Centrally, the feedback that is an integral factor in individual spoken communication is delayed, impoverished, or lacking altogether in mass communication. Audiences are deprived of the usual means of inducing communicators to modify their production. Mass communicators are deprived of the usual access to recipients' reactions (McQuail 1969).