[3] As a broadly ethnomethodological approach,[4] mediated stylistics is strongly influenced by discursive psychology (DP),[5] as well as the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK),[6] membership categorization analysis (MCA),[7] and the work of stylisticians like Mick Short,[8] Paul Simpson[9] and Lesley Jeffries,[10] in which the analytic utility of stylistics for an understanding of data other than strictly 'literary' texts becomes immediately apparent.
And once you reject—as these approaches reject—the possibility of some non-linguistic arbiter of accuracy, it follows that all descriptions (whether those we decide to treat as accurate or those we do not) have to be understood as the products of particular, locally specific contexts.
A journalist writing a news article about 'real events' and a novelist constructing a plausible-yet-imaginary-world may well be working with different materials, but they are both engaged in essentially the same kind of literary task: building descriptive vehicles with the potential to pull off a certain set of contextually specific actions such as detailing, characterizing, informing, confessing, defending, accusing, and so on, in what constitutes an infinitely extendable list of other such social actions.
This article studies mediated reportage of the charges of rape and sexual molestation made against Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of the organisation WikiLeaks, in late 2010.
Media commentators took this opportunity to build their own recontextualised descriptions of what actually happened as the (apparently) factual starting points for their own, subsequent evaluations of the (un)fairness and/or (il)legitimacy of the allegations.
Media stylistics as a research approach is widely known in Eastern Europe and especially in Russia, through the work of A. Vasileva, M. Kozhina, V. Kostomarov, L. Maydanova, I. Lysakova, K. Rogova, G. Solganik and others.