Ideology in Portraying the Israeli onslaught on Gaza in August 2022: A Transitivity Analysis of The Hindu and the Washington Post Reports

Mohammed M. A. Abunahel

doi:10.48165/sajssh.2023.4204

Authors

Mohammed M. A. Abunahel Ph.D. scholar,Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Mysore, Mysuru, Karnataka, India.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.48165/sajssh.2023.4204

Keywords:

critical discourse analysis, Gaza; Israel, media bias, transitivity, The Hindu, Washington Post

Abstract

This critical discourse analysis (CDA) investigates how The Hindu and the Washington Post (WP) construct their online news in depicting the Israeli onslaught on Gaza in August 2022. Halliday’s transitivity system was adopted to explore the hidden ideologies and analyze the textual choice or words' features in the clauses of thirteen (13) news articles from The Hindu and nine (9) from WP. The study's findings indicate that the most dominant processes in both news media were the verbal and material processes. Within the verbal process, it was divided into three sides: Palestinian, Israel and neutral. The findings reveal that both media have common strategies to represent the Israeli and neutral verbal process, while the selected media share similarities and differences in representing the Palestinian verbal process. The findings through the material process suggest that both media show Israel as an actor more than as a goal. They tend to use processes ‘verbs’ that are associated with extreme violence and less violence with Israel, whereas Palestinian are associated with less violence process, but the process is supported with adjectives, adverbs and numbers to place it in extreme violence. The analysis is then followed by the revealed methods and techniques used by the selected media. Overall, both news media have hidden ideologies to construct their news articles. Based on these empirical evidences, (CDA) appears to play an essential part in understanding the language that is employed in media discourses.

References

Abunahel, M. M. (2021). Infodemic & Social Media: Coronavirus Information Access in Gaza City Tezpur University].

Adawiyah, R., Junining, E., & Tabiati, S. E. (2020). Multimodal Depiction of Israelis and Palestinians on Gaza Conflict in Two Middle Eastern Press. Diglossia: Jurnal Kajian Ilmiah Kebahasaan dan Kesusastraan, 12(1), 20-35.

Ali, A., & Rahman, S. (2019). Media Bias Effects on Voters in Pakistan. Global Regional Review, 4(4), 557-567.

Amer, M. (2015). War reporting in the international press: A critical discourse analysis of the Gaza war of 2008-2009 Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky].

Amer, M. (2017). Critical discourse analysis of war reporting in the international press: the case of the Gaza war of 2008–2009. Palgrave Communications, 3(1), 1-11.

badah, A. A. M. (2017). The Media Prism: A Linguistic Analysis of the Presentation of Events by News Reportage. Int J Sci Res Publ

[Record #26 is using a reference type undefined in this output style.]

Barkho, L. (2008). The BBC's discursive strategy and practices vis-À-vis the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. . Journalism Studies, 9(2), 278-294.

Bass, W. (2004). Support any friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the making of the US-Israel alliance. Oxford University Press.

Bello, U. (2014). Ideology in reporting the ‘operation cast lead’, a transitivity analysis of the Arab News and New York Times reports. International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 3(3), 202-210.

Berrigan, F. (2009). Made in the USA: American military aid to Israel. Journal of Palestine Studies, 38(3), 6-21.

Chilton, P. (2004). Analysing Political Discourse. London and New York. Routledge.

Cotter, C. (2015). Discourse and Media. In D. T. Deborah Schiffrin, Heidi E. Hamilton (Ed.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis (Vol. II, pp. 416-436). Blackwell

Ezzina, R. (2021). Western's Media Representation of Palestine. International Journal of Progressive Sciences and Technologies, 25(1), 357-365.

Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. Longman.

Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Polity Press.

Fairclough, N. (1995). Media discourse E. Arnold.

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Psychology Press.

Fairclough, N. (2013). Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language. Routledge. Fairclough, N. (2015). Language and power (3rd edn.). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Finlay, W. (2018). Language and civilian deaths: Denying responsibility for casualties in the Gaza conflict 2014. Political psychology, 39(3), 595-609.

Fowler, R. (1991). Language in the News Discourse and Ideology in the Press. Routledge. Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). An introduction to functional grammar (2nd edn.). E. Arnold.

Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiesse, C. (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar (3rd edn.). Arnold.

Hossain, M. D. (2015). Manufacturing consent: Framing the liberation war of Bangladesh in the US and UK media. Journalism, 16(4), 521-535.

Issa, I. (2020). Analyzing transitivity and modality systems in war reporting in a selected ‘Israeli’Newspaper report: A Study with Systemic Functional Linguistics’ Perspective.

Joharta, E. B. (2016). The Transitivity-Passivization Interface in Two Online Newspapers About The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Satya Wacana Christian University]. Indonesia.

Kandil, M. A. (2009). The Israeli-Palestinian conflict in American, Arab, and British media: Corpus-based critical discourse analysis.

Levitt, M. (2004). Hamas from cradle to grave. Middle East Quarterly.

Makmun, s. (2013). The Ideational Meaning in the Mid-East Article of BBC News about Israel Gaza Violence UMK].

Martin, J. R., Matthiessen, C. M. I. M., & Painter, C. (1997). Working with Functional Grammar. In.

O’keeffe, A. (2011). Media and discourse analysis. In M. H. James Paul Gee (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 441-454). Routledge.

Phelan, M. (2016). What Is Media Discourse? https://michellephelandkit.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/what-is-media

discourse/#respond

Prihandani, R. A. (2016). The Cease-Fire in Gaza Conflict Represented by The Writers of The Jakarta Post and The New York Times SEMARANG STATE UNIVERSITY].

Qawariq, R. (2016). Critical language analysis of Palestinian and Israeli online newspapers and news websites during the 2014 Gaza War Lancaster University ]. United Kingdom.

Qawariq, R. (2020). Political and Ideological Tensions in Palestine: A critical language analysis of news reporting of the 2014 Gaza war. Connections: A Journal of Language, Media and Culture, 1(1), 68-78.

Rababah, A. G., & Hamdan, J. M. (2019). A Contrastive Critical Discourse Analysis of Netanyahu's and Abbas's Speeches on the Gaza War (2014). Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 10(1), 178.

Ramanathan, R., & Hoon, T. B. (2015). Application of Critical Discourse Analysis in Media Discourse Studies. 3L: Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies, 21(3).

Richardson, J. E. (2007). Analysing Newspapers: An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis. Palgrave Macmillan.

Rubinoff, A. G. (1995). Normalization of India-Israel relations: stillborn for forty years. Asian Survey, 35(5), 487-505.

Sanz Sabido, R. (2015). Palestine in the British press: A postcolonial critical discourse analysis. Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research, 8(3), 199-216.

Simpson, P. (1993). Language, ideology and point of view. Routledge.

Sofyan, A. N., & Zifana, M. (2019). Representing social action in Indonesian: A case of Indonesian presidential race. Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 9(2), 252-262.

Suwarno, S., & Sahayu, W. (2020). Palestine and Israel Representation in the National and International News Media: A Critical Discourse Study. Humaniora, 32(3), 217—225.

Taha, Y. A., & Al-Khanji, R. (2020). A Critical Discourse Analysis of Gaza Marches of Return Coverage in Selected Newspapers. Int. J. Linguist, 12(6), 163.

Tang, L. (2021). Transitive representations of China’s image in the US mainstream newspapers: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis. Journalism, 22(3), 804-820.

Tasseron, M., & Lawson, B. T. (2022). Legitimizing military action through statistics and discourse in the 2014 IDF assault on Gaza. Media, War & Conflict, 15(2), 238-256.

Törnberg, A., & Törnberg, P. (2016). Muslims in social media discourse: Combining topic modeling and critical discourse analysis. Discourse, Context & Media, 13, 132-142.

Van Dijk, T. A. (2015). Critical Discourse Analysis. In D. T. Deborah Schiffrin, Heidi E. Hamilton (Ed.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis (Vol. II, pp. 352-371). Blackwell

Van Krieken, K., Sanders, J., & Hoeken, H. (2015). Viewpoint representation in journalistic crime narratives: An analysis of grammatical roles and referential expressions. Journal of pragmatics, 88, 220-230.

Wang, C. (2017). Victimhood in the Face of Media Ideological Battle: A Critical Discourse Analysis on the British Media's Coverage of Stabbing Incidents in the Israeli Palestinian Conflict. Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 16(1), 79-98.