Media Discourse and the Production of Meaning: Analysis of the Iraq War 2003 in Malaysian and British Newspapers
War as a news event is an ideological struggle consisting a war both of ideas and of arms. Meaning-making activities associated with war as a news event operate at two different levels; one is overt, the other is covert. A simplistic perspective might explain newspapers as a tool of ideological stru...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English English |
| Published: |
2012
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| Online Access: | http://etd.uum.edu.my/3224/2/rohizahhalim.pdf http://etd.uum.edu.my/3224/4/rohizahhalim.pdf http://etd.uum.edu.my/3224/ |
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| Summary: | War as a news event is an ideological struggle consisting a war both of ideas and of arms. Meaning-making activities associated with war as a news event operate at two different levels; one is overt, the other is covert. A simplistic perspective might explain newspapers as a tool of ideological struggle that elites control, but this study takes the perspective that newspapers are also the product of the society and culture under which the media operate. Understanding the meanings of media texts can help answer the question of why news differs. Data for this research was the news coverage of the 2003 Iraq war from two newspapers. A total of 1033 news articles were collected from March 20th 2003 to April 15th 2003, a period of 26 days; the sample included 242 news articles from the Malaysian newspaper, New Straits Times (NST) and 791 news articles from British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph (DT). Because these newspapers also published letters to the editor, a total of 194 letters from the same time period were available to analyze. Utilizing Fairclough’s (1995b) approach, this study combined textual analysis with relevant explanations and illustrated how news texts were products of the news organization, society and culture. The findings suggested that news organizations set their news agendas along ideological lines, and the newsgathering practices were made to follow those lines. Society and culture influenced news texts on a more concealed level, but were no less influential in sustaining the meanings of war. The findings provided the opportunity to review and extend Fairclough’s (1995b) three-dimensional framework on news text. With text (form, content and language use) placed at the centre of the study, patterns of organizational, societal and cultural practices could be extracted to show how different groups produce different news. |
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