The purpose of this paper is to clarify what is the concept of the commentary text type in mass media such as newspapers, radio or television, how often do commentaries appear and how are they marked as commentaries. This paper ist also to investigate how can they be distinguished from other, neighbouring text types such as columns, editorials or guest comments. In this paper, we try to find an answer, drawing on definitions and descriptions found in research papers from the domain of text linguistics and media linguistics. It deals with some expansions of the textual model of the commentary, and the usage of this text type in the media serving various discourse communities. Finally, we try to present a research plan involving contrastive text linguistic analysis of commentaries in different media from german and korean countries, focusing attention on formulating a ‘tertium comparationis’ that would be theoretical and practical for the comparison of mass media text types.