The Localisation of International News Agency Reports in English Newspapers in the Middle East

Abstract

This thesis investigates the process of producing localised news reports by English newspapers in the Middle East instead of them using the actual news articles that they obtain from the international news agencies. The production of English news in the Middle East is a subject that has hardly been studied so far and this study is an attempt to shed light into how English news is produced and received in this part of the world. Since most news articles about international events reach the Middle East through the various international news agencies, news editors in the English newspapers in the region are faced with the task of fending off the ideologies that contradict with the local interest. In doing so, they end up injecting the reports with their own ideologies that might represent the local ideologies, and this process of producing the new news report is what is referred to in this thesis as the localisation process. The thesis aims to find out how and why this process is undertaken. News reports on a number of topics from both the international news agencies and an English newspaper in the Middle East are analysed using a multidisciplinary analytical framework that is based mainly on aspects of Critical Discourse Analysis and pragmatics. The analysis of the news reports shows a number of strategies employed by the English newspaper to walk around the ideologies of the international news agencies and produce its own versions of news reports. Combining ethnography with the analytical framework in order to interview news producers and readers from the Middle East reveals various reasons for English newspapers producing their localised versions.