This paper employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyse the representation of political social actors in media coverage of the Gaza war of 2008–2009. The paper examines texts of systematically chosen news stories from four international newspapers: ‘The Guardian, The Times London, The New York Times and The Washington Post’. The findings show substantial similarities in representation patterns among the four newspapers. More specifically, the selected newspapers foreground Israeli agency in achieving a ceasefire, whereby Israeli actors are predominantly assigned activated roles. By contrast, the four newspapers foreground Palestinian agency in refusing ceasefire through assigning activated roles. The findings of this study suggest that news reports on the Gaza war of 2008–2009 are influenced by the political orientations of the newspapers and also their liberal and conservative ideological stances. Overall, the most represented actors are Israeli governmental officials, whereas Palestinian actors are Hamas members. This representation draws an overall image that the war is being directed against Hamas.
The concept of legitimation is essentially social and political (Martin Rojo and Van Dijk, 1997). That is, what or who is legitimized depends to a large extent on who speaks and in what capacity, social status and role he/she speaks from. Legitimation, in this sense, is linked to power, with which comes the authority to `define the situation' (Parsons, 1986), and consequently the authority to determine what is right and wrong, and what is legitimate and justifiable and what is not. In this paper I examine the delegitimation of the second Palestinian Intifada in Thomas Friedman's discourse by analysing how the Intifada is discursively constructed in a column which Friedman contributed to the op-ed page of the New York Times. I aim to do this by (1) analysing the column's argumentative structure and moves employed in Friedman's delegitimizing construction of the Intifada, and (2) showing how the legitimation of political actors, including self-legitimation, is closely linked to Friedman's argumentation. I also report on the results of a critical discourse analysis of a corpus of Friedman's columns which support the analysis findings of the main text.
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