Newspaper ideology: a critical discourse analysis of an event published in six Lebanese newspapers

Abstract

This research focuses on the analysis of ideology and language in six Lebanese newspapers, and tries to establish if, and to what extent, the ideology behind the text limits the freedom of expression of the newspaper in question. The Lebanese press is a good example because events are published in three languages and each plays a major role in the country. In order to achieve the aim of this research, an event that is reported in various political newspapers is analysed in order to register the different attitudes of the Lebanese political press according to the ideology of the particular newspaper. Lebanese journalists visited the Maronite Patriarch after the 2006 July war between Hezbollah and Israel, and the discourse of this event in the political press reflects the conflict of attitudes among the different parties or groups inside Lebanon towards this war. Discourse analysis is applied in this research by analysing the data in accordance with its principles. This research evaluates the transitivity of the sentences, the active and passive voice used in the articles, the modality with the help of modal auxiliary verbs, disjuncts or modal adjectives. It also analyses the headlines and the representation of the article in each newspaper. In this research, the discourse used in each newspaper is to be analysed and criticised relying on Halliday, Fowler, Nordlund, Thompson, Fairclough and Reah.