An outline of frameworks for conceptualising and analysing news media roles in the representation of teachers, is followed by a discussion of quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study of news coverage. An argument is made for the benefit of using corpus linguistic tools within the overall conceptual focus on lexical and syntactical structures offered by critical discourse analysis. Findings are presented from a comprehensive study of the press portrayal of teachers and education. Focusing on the portrayal of teachers in news headline coverage, the study shows a considerable lexical and syntactic change between 1991 and 2005 in the public/news representation of teachers, broadly from a negative view of teachers as troublesome to a more positive emphasis on teachers as a hard-working profession besieged by mounting pressures. (Contains 1 table and 1 note.)