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CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Problem
According to Wodak (1995: 204), Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is
"fundamentally concerned with analyzing opaque as well as transparent
structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power, and control as
manifested in language". In another research conducted by Wodak (2001:2),
she clarifies CDA's aims as being methods "to investigate critically social
inequality as it is expressed, signaled, constituted, and legitimized, and so on by
language use (or in discourse)". Nevertheless, Blommaert (2001: 15) mentions
that CDA overtly takes a strong vow to change and stand against domination
and discrimination.

It is obvious that many scholars agree, such as Wodak, Van Dijk,

Fairclough and others, that CDA is a branch of study that is concerned with
analyzing and studying texts and discourses as a social practice to decode the
discursive bases of dominance, power, racism, and inequality. It investigates the
way these “discursive sources” are sustained and “reproduced within specific
social, political, economic, and historical contexts”. For the same reason, Van
Dijk (2001: 352) outlines CDA very clearly as "a type of discourse analytical
research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance and
inequality are enacted, reproduced and resisted by text and talk in the social and
political context".

This study is concerned with Islamic movements’ news reporting of two

global media institutions, which are generally responsible for shaping and
filtering the audience opinions of events all over the world, namely CNN and
Aljazeera English. CNN, “the world’s first 24-hour news satellite channel, has
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services in (12) languages and several English editions covering the four
corners of the world” (Barkho, 2008: 25). Moreover, in a single decade
“Aljazeera has turned into the kind of media whose power policy and decision
makers can hardly be ignored. The recent addition of an English language
satellite channel has turned the network into a global media player” (ibid). This
work is an attempt to describe and analyze reports about the Islamic
movements’ same news in each of the two TV channels in order to show the
gaps and to clarify the ideologies of each. In addition, the research provides an
empirical qualitative and quantitative analyses of the selected reports in
accordance to the selected model of the study.

The problem of the Study lies in the thought that the media may be telling
not only facts but also trying to control the audience views and ideologies
through presenting the news of Islamic Movements. And some of these media
channels looks as if they discriminate the look to Islam by doing so, especially
in non-Islamic communities. So that, the audience will think about Islamic
communities as if they are groups of militias that aims to kill innocent people.
As a result, critical discourse analysis aims to show to the audience how the
media manipulates the language of the news in order to reach its aims and to
impose its ideologies.

The present study attempts to answer the following questions:

1. To what extent both channels, CNN and Al-Jazeera English, vary in reporting
the news of the same event, concerning the Islamic movements, by using the
grammatical and semantic structures in the same way?

2. How various ideologies, particularly those of power, racism, manipulations

and misrepresentations of the truth, are expressed in various sorts of discursive
strategies related to Islamic movements by both channels?
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3. How are the in-group and the out-group represented in both channels?

4. How the chosen media channels depend on propaganda; thus how positive
lexicalizations are used in addressing the in-group and other negative ones to
address the out-group in order to achieve their purposes, identities and the
manipulation of behaviour?

5. What is the most used discursive strategy in both channels?

1.2 Aims

The study aims at:

1. Exploring the linguistic structures which are used by both channels in

addressing Islamic movements?

2. Showing how various ideologies, particularly those of power racism,

manipulations and misrepresentations of the truth, are expressed in various
kinds of discursive strategies related to Islamic movements’ news by both
channels.

3. Identifying the in-group and the out-group in both channels.

4. Examining how the two chosen channels depends on propaganda to achieve

their purposes, identities and the manipulation of behavior or not.

5. Modifying the most used discursive strategy in both channels.

6. How terrorism and Islamic movements' news are reproduced and televised by
two well-known TV channels which are CNN and Al-Jazeera English.

1.3 Hypotheses

It is hypothesized that:
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1. The grammatical and semantic structures are extensively used in addressing

the Islamic movements’ news through reports in CNN than in Al-Jazeera
English.

2. Various ideologies, especially those of power, racism, manipulations and

misrepresentations of the truth, are expressed in various kinds of discursive
strategies related to Islamic movements’ news in Al-Jazeera English more
than CNN.

3. The in-group and out-group are different in both channels because each
channel serves its ideology.

4. Both channels depend on propaganda to achieve their purposes, identities,

and the manipulation of behaviour, thus to serve their own ideologies.

5. Each channel depends basically on one discursive strategy, that is, the most
used one through reporting the news concerning the Islamic movements.
Thus, CNN uses concretization most, in order to reveal a negative others-
presentation of the out-group and to let the audience imagine the situation of
the out-group which is mostly negative. While Al-Jazeera English depends
on norm and value violation strategy in order to declare that the out-group
are violating the norms and values of human right, a thing which makes a
direct negative others-presentation.

1.4 Procedure

To carry out the aims defined in (1-2) above and to test their hypotheses in
(1-3), the next steps are followed:

1. Providing a theoretical background concerning the field of critical discourse

analysis, the media, and propaganda.
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2. Collecting 10 news reports from the official website of each channel for
analysis on the basis of two criteria, first, each report event of CNN should
be the same of Al-Jazeera English and within the same period of time,
second, each report should be concerned mainly with one or more Islamic
Movement in order to cover as much as possible most of the known Islamic
Movements.

3. The model of this study is an eclectic model which depends on two levels for
the analysis, i.e., micro analysis and macro analysis. The micro analysis
consists of the syntactic, rhetorical and the semantic sub-levels; while the
macro analysis, on the other hand, is concerned with the ideological level,
which depends on the adopted Van Dijk's 'ideological square' (1998) to
declare the macro ideological consequences that occur “within the discursive
structure of the news reports” of the selected channels, namely, CNN and
Aljazeera English, as well as Van Dijk's Ideological Discourse Analysis
(1995) to explore the “discursive strategies” used in the news of the two
channels and because this model links the formations of discourse with those
of the society in that “the members of a certain group effect social structures
through social interaction” ( Van Dijk,1995:136). In addition to the use of
Halliday’s notion of Transitivity (1994) in order to show (through the
notion’s participants, processes and contexts) that there are some Islamic
movement under the name of terrorism and others are not.

4. The analysis is then rounded off with qualitative and quantitative results,
conclusions, recommendations, and suggestions for further studies.

1.5 Limits

This Study is a critical discourse analysis of (20) news reports concerning

the Islamic movements; (10) reports are chosen from the formal website of
CNN, and the other (10) are chosen from the official website of Aljazeera
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English. The Study deals with news reports in the period from 2006 till 2018,
thus 2006 is the turning point in media production because in this year, a first
Arabic news TV channel prodcasted in English, which is Al-Jazeera English.
This might change about a changing the look to Islam in general after the
terrorist attack of 11 September, 2001 in America.

1.6 Value

The implication of this Study lies in identifying the discursive strategies

as well as the linguistic structures that are used by both channels in order to find
out the in-group and the out-group of both channels. Consequently, the receiver
will be able to see that most of the media genres state only a part of the truth
and hide the bigger part in order to serve their own ideologies and policies.
However, the Study helps the reader knowing and identifying how the media in
general is manipulating and re-structuring the news by reproducing it again and
again till it fits out the perfect image that it would satisfy the media’s own
ideologies and special interests. Furthermore, this study sheds light on the look
of Islam in general and on the Movements that are considered to be Islamic in
particular by the media. Accordingly, since both of the selected channels are
global, but at the same time each of them is related to a different area and has a
different audience; this study shows how each channel reports the same news
event in a different way from the other to achieve especial purposes and to
shape the audience views the way that these channels want.