The position I want to advocate addresses a significant gap in the existing literature, which is the absence of an adequate perspective through which to assess the ways in which news and current affairs items represent social reality. The majority of analyses of media texts confine themselves to the examination and foregrounding of what we might call the ‘rhetoric of the text’ itself. They look at the ways in which texts frame events, signify meanings, create stories that involve and persuade, and insinuate identifications and antagonisms. They do not, in any systematic way, take the extra step of posing questions about the status and satisfactoriness of the text's representations of reality when measured against the conceptual benchmarks and standards of adequacy intrinsic to social theory and social science. Those perspectives that do exist which are critical of the quality and status of media accounts of social reality tend to be quite restricted and limited in one way or another (Street 2001: 15–35). Some are primarily focused on revealing systematic ideological bias (e.g Glasgow University Media Group 1980), others on correlating the messages of textual accounts to the interests of particular elites, governments or states (e.g. Herman and Chomsky 1988), and yet others on establishing a sharp distinction between the ideology propagated by the media, as well as by other institutions, and the truth of relatively abstract scientific theories, as is the case, for example, with the Althusserian Marxist tradition (e.g. Althusser 1971). These are essentially top-down, overly rationalistic, approaches designed to test or to prove a pre-given thesis, and as such they fail to open themselves up sufficiently to an engagement with the specificities of texts. Social theory possesses a much richer array of resources to draw on than these approaches would suggest. These resources need to be carefully harnessed to the task of judging, assessing, the status and satisfactoriness of a text's representations of reality. This focus, as we shall see, needs to be combined with, rather than set against, sensitivity towards the rhetoric of the text.