A critical discourse analysis of Al Jazeera’s online coverage of the war in Yemen before and after the 5 June 2017 Gulf crisis

Abstract

In this study, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) was utilised to examine the Al Jazeera Arabic news website with respect to its reports on the social actors in the Yemen war, particularly the KSA, UAE, Egypt and Bahrain coalition and the opposing Houthis, both before and after the Gulf crisis that occurred on 5 June 2017. The analysed data included a total of 32 news articles related to the war in Yemen, with 16 articles covering the period prior to the Crisis, from 2015 to 2017, and 16 covering the period following the onset of the crisis, from 2017 to 2019. The overall aim was to uncover the ideological implications of various linguistic elements, such as lexical choices, news headline creation, and de-legitimisation strategies, and the results revealed identifiable, distinct, and non-random changes in tone and angle of representation relating to the various social actors and their actions. Before the crisis, the coalition was represented positively while Houthis was presented negatively, while after the crisis, the tone towards these social actors was completely reversed. The various discursive strategies used in the articles across both periods thus show that the coverage of the Yemen crisis was intended to ideologically and politically guide readers’ understanding of the crisis.