Moustafa, Hesham (2013) Representation in War Reporting: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Al-Jazeera and the BBC Web-based English News Coverage of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
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Abstract
The present study aims to explore web-based news reports by the BBC and Al-Jazeera relating to the reporting of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, with a view to discovering any significant representation of the selected event. It is possible that the language of war reports reflects divergent attitudes and opinions which are shaped by the beliefs, values and ideologies of different news media. The present study will focus on the analysis of certain salient details of linguistic structure as related to the systems of transitivity, i.e. participant roles and associated process types, the logico-semantic system of expansion and projection, covering the logical relations between clauses, as well as cases of syntactic transformation. The system of transitivity, in particular, is an essential tool in the analysis of the representation of some aspects of reality such as the structure of events and their participants (cf. Fowler, 1991). By conducting a linguistic analysis of the selected news texts in the light of the socio-political and historical context of these texts and of the covered event, the present study presents findings concerning the ways different news outlets can offer varying representations of the same event by employing varying textual structures. Analysis of the corpora of Al-Jazeera and the BBC reveals contrasting representations in the two news outlets reporting on the 2006 war. The discerned similarities in the representation of the covered war could be said to reflect the news outlets' endeavours to adhere to journalistic values, the factual style of the genre of the hard news report and considerations of the targeted audience, which would leave limited potential for partial or biased coverage of events. The discerned differences highlight the ways in which varying political positions and ideologies can shape news reporting and the ways in which differences in ownership and source of revenue could potentially affect editorial freedom and the way journalists function.