In this paper I use theoretical and methodological literature as well as international research studies to develop methodological grounds for the study of the media constructing education policy and politics. In an earlier study (Wiklund 2006) I analysed the construction of educational issues in a Swedish daily newspaper. The study was carried out as a discourse analysis and I used a post-structural discourse methodology inspired by applications of Foucault and Derrida (cf. Ball 1994; Howarth & Torfing 2005; MacLure 2003). The study closed with a discussion of the broader social and political implications of the constructions. Pursuing my interest in this direction further awoke questions concerning the empirical investigation of how the constructions of educational issues in the media might affect education policy and politics. A working theory to analyse the complex relationship between the media, its audiences and educational policy and politics was needed. This is what I aim to develop in this paper. The relationship between the media and its audiences is a field of inquiry well established. Media reception theory is one important methodology. It was developed out of dissatisfaction with a media effect research that lacked understanding of the audience as active. It also put forward a critique of text centeredness and elitism within the strong media theory traditions. Media reception analysis is concerned with mass communication in terms of the social production of meaning, claimed to address both discursive and social aspects: “there can be no ‘effect’ without ‘meaning’” (Bruhn Jensen 1991, p 135). This also implies that the ideological effects of texts never can be assumed but always must be examined through studies of actual audience interpretations. Within the framework of other methodologies the media-audience relationship has been studied in more specific terms. Agenda studies (McCombs & Shaw 1972) explore the extent to which the issues raised by the media are seen as important to its audiences, whereas frame analysis (Goffman 1997; Johnson-Cartee 2005) is concerned with the study of process through which political issues are framed; defined and embedded in political discourse giving them rhetorical force.

The results from my earlier study and some works with similar focus (such as Anderson 2007; Blackmore & Thorpe 2003; MacLure & Pettigrew 1997; Macmillan 2002) convinced me of the usefulness of discourse analysis when examining the media constructions of education. Hence my intention is to let post-structural discourse analysis be a part of the methodology I aim to develop. I did however experience that the conceptual and theoretical frameworks of reception analysis and this brand of discourse analysis made them somewhat difficult to combine into an overall research design.

In this paper literature dealing with discourse analysis and audience research as well as research on media constructions of educational issues is studied in order to investigate the difficulties mentioned above and work out a way to overcome them in order to develop and formulate methodological grounds to further the investigation of the media as constructors of education policy and politics. A broader outcome of the paper is that it makes a case for the media as an important arena for educational research.