This study analyses the construction and cultural effects of news values in the discourse of British and Japanese television news. This cross-cultural comparative study seek to clarify how public service broadcasting in each country forms values in television news items, and how culture and society are related to language in the news discourse in each nation. This study is based on the notion that the language of news does not reflect the intrinsic importance of the events which are reported. Rather, every element in the discourse of television news is selected by newsmakers according to their particular criteria: news values, which can be defined by features of a news event judged by newsmakers to be significant to the audience. This study also considers that news values are ideological structures that are socially and culturally constructed. This thesis develops a multi-dimensional framework for analysing the discourse of both British and Japanese television news. The framework consists of different levels of elements, including content (commentary; selection of information), discourse organisational structure (rhetorical features; textual relationship), the use of language (the arrangement of lexical items; syntax) and non-linguistic strategies (visual elements; iconography).