Greg Philio: The Critique Of Textual Analysis In The Media

Greg Philio argues that textual analysis is not enough when researching media, on its own textual analysis fails to tell us how the text was produced as well as how it was consumed and interpreted. Philio examines this idea by stating that we fail to know the origins of the media such as where they came from and how they relate to different social interests. It also lacks the possible accounts chosen and the diversity within them as well as the impacts of external factors such as the journalists understanding and what the text actually means to different audiences (Philo, 2007). Philio continues further to state that there are more issues with a text only analysis, the accuracy of representations, the significance the text has on the audience and how it changes in diverse social interests. Philio argues that analysis should explore the accuracy of the text, is it right or wrong? Is it politically significant? A discourse analysis for instance fails to address this point which Philio uses as an example. In order to

Fursich argues that textual analysis does consider context and audiences as long as it’s not conducted in a simplistic way, being a valuable tool of research. In this critique three arguments are addressed, a textual analyst can create different meanings of a text that somebody else would not find , allowing you to create or discover features that the audience would not discover, even potentially the producers due to the analyst’s level of skill within this area. You are also able to spot connections with historic discourses which you could not collect from audience research as audiences would have been too young to know what was going on. This results in texts being the only source we have left to portray historic events. Therefore, Fursich is arguing against Philio’s critique disagreeing with the idea that textual analysis is not enough to make judgments on social meaning and