Discourse analysis of the representations of women in Moroccan broadcast news

Abstract

An interesting area of research that as yet has received little or no attention is the study of the representations of women in Moroccan media [Ennaji, M., 1995. A syntactico-semantic study of the language of news in Morocco. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 112 (1), 97–112. Sadiqi, F., 2003. Women, gender, and language in Morocco. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill Academic. Skalli, L.H., 2006. Through a local prism: gender, globalization, and identity in Moroccan women's magazines. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Van-Mol, M., 2010. Arabic media and corpus linguistics: a first methodological outline. In: R. Rassiouney, ed. Arabic and the media: linguistic analysis and applications. Boston, MA: Drill, 63–79]. This article is an effort to fill the gap in this research area and contribute to the ongoing debate about the status of women in Morocco by analysing discourse representations of women in Arabic television news on the two main Moroccan television channels: 2M and Al Aoula. Women's representations are considered at a large scale (macrostructure) and at a smaller scale (microstructures) [Van Dijk, T.A., 1988. News as discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. Richardson, J.E., 2007. Analysing newspapers: an approach from critical discourse analysis. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan]. The results of our study showed the Moroccan television news programmes in Arabic on both channels favour two specific discourse perspectives: the conservative perspective which associates women with domesticity and traditional roles, and an alternative progressive perspective which associates women with modernity and economic development. Both empowering and disempowering elements are present in the two discourses.