“You’ve Been Framed!”: Thematization and Ideological Bias in Arabic and English News Reports

Abstract

Within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the present article investigates the role of thematization in framing news reports in favor of the respective ideologies of the online versions of the English newspapers, The New York Times and The Telegraph (NYT and TG, hereafter), and those of the Arabic newspapers, Al-Ahram and Al-Jazeera (AH and AJ, hereafter). To this end, 40 news reports, 10 from each newspaper, were chosen for analysis. The 40 reports cover 10 major incidents in the period between February 2012 and July 2015. NYT is an American liberal media institution while TG is a British conservative one, and AH is a state-owned Egyptian newspaper while AJ is a global news organization owned by Al-Jazeera Media Network, the Qatari stateowned media conglomerate. The stark difference between the ideologies in both sets of newspapers, coupled with the different cultural background, is mainly reflected in how news reports arrange bits of discourse in order to steer the reader's perception of the news event in a certain ideological direction. Results reveal that each newspaper adjusts its headlines' schematic categories in the way that best serves its ideological goals, with the exception of AJ which sticks to the objective schematic categories predicted to be present in headlines. Additionally, analysis reveals that Arabic news reports depend on thematic markedness in the expression of bias more than the English ones.