A Study on Critical Discourse Analysis: The Case of Discursive Structures Used in Leftist and Rightist Newspapers to Express a Political Ideology

According to Van Dijk (2004), few areas in the social sciences are as closely related as those of the study of politics, ideology, and discourse. In addition, politics is one of the social domains whose practices are virtually exclusively discursive; political cognition is by definition ideologically based; and political ideologies are largely reproduced by discourse. The aim of the current study was to analyze the discursive strategies and structures employed by some of the American left-wing and right-wing newspapers in news coverage of a particular political news report. To fulfill this purpose, a comparable English corpus of news coverage from two leftist newspapers, namely USA Today and The New York Times and two rightist newspapers, namely Fox News and Breitbart was provided. The approach adopted to carry out this study is Van Dijk s (2004) model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as well as some categories of Ideological Discourse Analysis proposed by him. In sum, Van Dijk (2004) believes that there is a close relationship between discourse, ideology and politics, in the sense that politics is usually discursive as well as ideological, and ideologies are largely reproduced by text and talk. In conclusion, the findings revealed that each newspaper has its own ideology and may be affiliated to a special political party. Therefore, the way a newspaper, say, The New York Times, reports a news story is completely different from, say, Breitbart does. This is due to the fact that in news coverage, ideology goes hand in hand with discourse; thus, each newspaper uses particular discursive strategies to represent its own ideology in the news report. Apart from this, it’s worth mentioning that one of the issues which is of prime importance in translating a political text is comprehending the underlying ideologies in the text. Since the ideologies are covert in discourse, a translator who is skillful at critical reading enjoys an advantage of understanding and reproducing the underlying ideologies

Keywords:

Critical Discourse Analysis , Discursive Structures , Leftist and Rightist Newspapers , Political Ideology