Abstract
This study examines the ideological representation of fear and hope in online newspaper reports on COVID-19 in Saudi Arabia. The study adopts critical discourse analysis (CDA) of Van Dijk's tripartite framework of news text structure and production at microstructure level and Fairclough's insights on the interactivity between language and social cognition in the process of producing and interpreting texts. The data for this study is samples of online news on COVID-19 reported in two English Saudi website;Saudi Gazette and Arab News, six from each journal. The samples cover the period between March 4 and August 14, 2020, and are purposefully chosen to understand the language of the news reports on a specific issue over a period of time. A qualitative analysis of the data is carried out so that the perceived effect of the linguistic encoding of the news events is examined. The findings show that most of the reports on COVID-19 heavily rely on foregrounding evidentiality of statistics of new and cumulative infections as well as recoveries and deaths. Evidentiality strategy often overlaps with categorization strategy as proof of the threat of the virus which is broken down into units, each with its features and evidence. Authority strategy is used to support statistics with verifiable sources. Similarly, in representing hope to the populace, two strategies of evidentiality and authority are often used. Evidentiality strategy is employed to clear off doubts through for grounding statistics of growing recoveries, comparisons and underrepresentation of infection cases and mortalities and sometimes choice of verbs plays a role in imparting hope in the residents. Authority strategy is deployed in order to give some weight to the ideology inherent in the report.
Highlights
With the breakout of Coronavirus (Covid-19) in China in December 2019 and the subsequent discovery of the first case in Saudi Arabia on March 2/2020, a wave of panic pervaded the scene
The data for this study is purposefully obtained from news items on COVID-19 reported in two Saudi online newspapers: Saudi Gazette and Arab News, six texts from each journal that come under COVID-19 Daily Reports in Saudi, irrespective of their emotive appeals (See Table I the data of the study in the Appendix 1, for the complete news reports which uptake fear or hope invoked experiences in the two assigned journals)
This study has examined the ideological representation of fear and hope in online newspaper reports on COVID-19 in Saudi Arabia
Summary
With the breakout of Coronavirus (Covid-19) in China in December 2019 and the subsequent discovery of the first case in Saudi Arabia on March 2/2020, a wave of panic pervaded the scene. In particular, have their own particular structure which corresponds to information gradation consisting of headlines, the byline “who wrote the report”, the main lead, the body and an end This is what Van Dijk (1998b) called the “thematic structure” of a news topic. Media reports are significant as it has the power to orient public opinion and foreground certain figures and background others to “create a negative or positive influence and reaction among readers especially that their well-being, and safety are under threat” (AlAfnan, 2020) This is what the present study undertakes to unfold the enactment of ideology in such texts through meaning-making of the microstructure employed in news reports of Covid-19
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