Discursive Representation of Victims of Mosque Attacks in Egypt and New Zealand

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33806/ijaes.v23i2.465

Keywords:

Appraisal Theory, Egypt, framing, New Zealand, socio-semantics, victims

Abstract

This study examined the discursive representation of victims of two terrorist attacks that occurred in Egypt and New Zealand. The data include all news reports released by the online version of The Guardian and The Washington Post on the attacks. To this end, we employ Martin and White's (2005) Appraisal Theory, van Leeuwen's (2008) Socio-semantic Inventory and Entman’s (1993) Framing Theory. This article filled a gap in literature as it is the first – to the best of our knowledge - to address Muslim victims of terrorist attacks in two countries, one Muslim, and one Christian.  Discussion reinforced the belief that there is disparity in journalistic treatment in favour of victims in a country culturally and linguistically belonging to the west (New Zealand). All the 10 frames devised for this study, side by side with the appraisal resources deployed, reveal a marked difference between the ‘high-profile’ representation of Christchurch social actors and the ‘low-profile’ depiction of the Sinai social actors.  All the socio-semantic categorisations of victims also prove such discursive disproportion.

Author Biographies

Mohamed El-Nashar , Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport, Egypt

College of Language and Communication

Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport, Egypt

Heba Nayef , Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport, Egypt

College of Language and Communication

Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport, Egypt

References

Ahmed, Saifuddin and Matthes Jörg. (2017). ‘Media representation of Muslims and Islam from 2000 to 2015: A meta-analysis’. International Communication Gazette, 79(3): 219-244.

Billig, Michael. (2008). ‘The language of critical discourse analysis: The case of nominalisation.’ Discourse and Society, 19(6): 783-800.

Campbell, David. (2012). ‘The iconography of famine’. In Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller, and Jay Prosser (eds.), Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis, 79–91. London, UK: Reaktion Books.

Castello, Dominic. (2015). Discursive representations of migrants in the British press as victims and perpetrators: A corpus-assisted discourse analysis. Ph.D. Dissertation, Birmingham: University of Birmingham.

Chahal, Kusminder. (2009). Discursive Analysis of the Accounts of Victims of Racist Incidents. Open University (United Kingdom).

Chouliaraki, Lilie. (2006). The Spectatorship of Suffering. London, UK: SAGE Publications.

Clifton, Jonathan. (2009). ‘A membership categorisation analysis of the Waco Siege: Perpetrator-victim identity as a moral discrepancy device for ‘doing’ subversion’. Sociological Research Online, 14(5): 38-48.

Christie, Nils. (1986). ‘The ideal victim’. In Ezzat A. Fattah (ed.), From Crime Policy to Victim Policy. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Conboy, Martin. (2007). The Language of the News. London: Routledge.

D’Angelo, Paul. (2002). ‘News framing as a multiparadigmatic research program: A response to Entman’. Journal of Communication, 52(4): 870-888.

de Vreese, Claes H. (2005). ‘News framing: Theory and typology’. Information Design Journal, 13(1): 51–62.

El-Masry, Mohamad. (2009). ‘Death in the Middle East: An analysis of how The New York Times and Chicago Tribune framed killings in the second Palestinian intifada’. Journal of Middle East Media, 9(1): 1–46.

El-Masry, Mohamad Hamas and Mohammed El-Nawawy. (2022). ‘The value of Muslim and non-Muslim life: A comparative content analysis of elite American newspaper coverage of terrorism victims’. Journalism, 23(2): 533-551.

El-Nawawy, Mohammed and Mohamad Hamas El-Masry. (2017). ‘Valuing victims: A comparative framing analysis of The Washington Post’s coverage of violent attacks against Muslims and non-Muslims’. International Journal of Communication, 11 (20): 1795-1815.

Entman, Robert. (1993). ‘Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm’. Journal of Communication, 43(4): 51-58.

Fairclough, Norman. (1995). Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold.

Fairclough Norman. (2013). Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. London: Routledge.

Fairhurst, Gail T. (2005). ‘Reframing the art of framing: Problems and prospects for leadership’. Leadership, 1(2): 165-185.

Fowler, Roger. (1991). Language in the News. London and New York: Routledge.

Gerbner, George. (1980). ‘Death in prime time: Notes on the symbolic functions of dying in the mass media’. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 447: 64-70.

Greer, Chris. (2016). ‘Crime, media and community: Grief and virtual engagement in late modernity’. In Jeff Ferrell, Keith J. Hayward, Wayne Morrison, and Mike Presdee, (eds.). Cultural Criminology Unleashed, 109-121. London: Cavendish.

Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood and Christian Matthiessen. (2014). Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar. London/New York: Routledge.

Hanitzsch, Thomas. (2007). ‘Deconstructing journalism culture: Toward a universal theory’. Communication Theory, 17 (4): 367–385.

Hanusch, Folker. (2008). ‘Publishing the perished: The visibility of foreign death in Australian quality newspapers’. Media International Australia, 125(1): 29-40.

Hawkins, Virgil. (2002). ‘The other side of the CNN factor: The media and conflict’. Journalism Studies, 3(2): 225–240.

Herman, Edward, and Noam Chomsky. (1988). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York, NY: Pantheon.

Hoffman, Bruce. (1998) Inside Terrorism. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd.

Ismail, Amani and Smeeta Mishra. (2019). ‘Configuring terrorism in the age of ISIS: The New York Times’ coverage of the 2015 Beirut and Paris attacks’. Global Media and Communication, 15(2): 177-193.

Joye, Stijn. (2010). ‘News discourses on distant suffering: A critical discourse analysis of the 2003 SARS outbreak’. Discourse & Society, 21(5), 586–601.

Kamalipour, Yahya R. (2010). ‘Language, media and war: Manipulating public perceptions’. Media, 3(1-4): 87.

Kearns, Erin. M., Allison E. Betus and Anthony F. Lemieux (2019). ‘Why do some terrorist attacks receive more media attention than others?’ Justice Quarterly, 36(6): 985-1022.

Kim, Jeffrey, Ellan Lee, Timothy Thomas and Caroline Dombrowski. (2009). ‘Storytelling in new media: The case of alternate reality games, 2001–2009’. First Monday. 14(6): 1-18.

Martin, James. R. and David Rose. (2007). ‘Interacting with text: The role of dialogue in learning to read and write’. Foreign Languages in China, 4(5): 66-80.

Martin, James. R. and Peter R. White. (2005). The Language of Evaluation (Vol. 2). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Page, Benjamin I. (1996). Who Deliberates? Mass Media in Modern Democracy. Chicago: The University of Chicago.

Pfefferbaum, Betty. (2003). ‘Victims of terrorism and the media’. In Andrew Silke, Terrorists, Victims and Society: Psychological Perspectives on Terrorism and its Consequences, 175-187. Wiley.

Price, Vincent, David Tewksbury and Elizabeth Powers. (1995, November). Switching trains of thought: The impact of news frames on readers’ cognitive responses. Paper presented at the annual conference of the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research, Chicago, IL.

Qi, Hui and Fengyuan Ye. (2020). ‘Contrastive analysis of discursive constructions in terrorist attack reports between Chinese and British newspapers: Case study of reports on Beijing and Barcelona terrorist attacks’. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 27(4): 361-378.

Scheufele, Dietram, and David Tweksbury. (2007). ‘Framing, agenda setting, and priming: The evolution of three media effects models’. Journal of Communication, 57(1): 9–20

Smolej, Mirka. (2010). ‘Constructing ideal victims? Violence narratives in Finnish crime-appeal programming’. Crime Media Culture, 6(1): 69–85.

Tashi, Tenzin, Vitalis Mbuya and H. V. Gangadharappa. (2016). ‘Corrective action and preventive actions and its importance in quality management system: A review’. International Journal of Pharmaceutical Quality Assurance, 7(01): 1-6.

van Dijk, Teun A. (1995). ‘Opinions and ideologies in editorials’. 4th international symposium of critical discourse analysis, language, social life and critical thought, Athens, 14–16 December.

van Dijk, Teun A. (2005). ‘Discourse analysis as ideology analysis’. In Christina Schäffner and Anita L. Wenden (eds.), Language & peace, Vol. 6, 41-58. London: Routledge.

van Dijk, Teun A. (2006). ‘Discourse and manipulation’. Discourse & society, 17(3): 359-383.

van Dijk, Teun A. (2009). ‘News, discourse, and ideology’. In Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsch (eds.), The Handbook of Journalism Studies, 211-224. London: Routledge.

van Leeuwen, Theo. (2008). Discourse and Practice: New tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford university press.

Walter, Tony, Jane Littlewood and Michael Pickering. (1995). ‘Death in the news: The public invigilation of private emotion’. Sociology, 29(4): 579-596.

White, Peter R. (1998). Telling media tales: The news story as rhetoric. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Sydney, Sydney.

White, Peter R. (2005). ‘The language of attitude, arguability and interpersonal positioning’. Retrieved June 4 (2022): http://grammatics.com/appraisal/.

White, Peter R. (2007). Appraisal. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Zhenhua, Wang. (2001). ‘Appraisal system and their operation: A new development in the systemic functional linguistics’. Journal of Foreign Languages, 6: 13-20.

Downloads

Date of Publication

2023-06-20

How to Cite

El-Nashar , M., & Nayef , H. (2023). Discursive Representation of Victims of Mosque Attacks in Egypt and New Zealand. International Journal of Arabic-English Studies, 23(2), 299–318. https://doi.org/10.33806/ijaes.v23i2.465

Issue

Section

Table of Contents