Critical Discourse Analysis: A Study towards Translating Ideas New in Focus

The present study aims at investigating the underlying ideo-political underpinnings of the news stories in three selected newspaper coverage of Syrian conflicts. In this regard, Washington Post, AFP and KayhanInternational were selected as the representatives of three ideo-political voices. From within the voluminous news stories in these papers, a sample of six news items was selected. Hodge-Kress model of CDA was drawn upon to account for the micro and macro structure of the select news stories. The data was analyzed within an essentially linguistically oriented framework of CDA. Accordingly, five influential discursive structures,i.e., naming, nominalization, causality andagency were selected to be analyzed through Hodge and Kress Model. The reliability of the analysis was ascertained using inter-rater reliability method. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. The results of Chi-Square test showed that there are significant differences in the type and tenor of ideological representations among the select news stories. Accordingly, there was a significant difference between the selected media in using two discursive structures of nominalization and agency while the difference was not significant in naming and causality. The results also revealed that the press representation of Syrian conflicts are ideo-politically biased, which may account for the multi-directional power relations in media discourse.

Keywords:

CDA , ideo-political underpinning , discursive structures , Hodge and Kress Model