The Representation of Islamophobia: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Yahoo News

Abstract

This descriptive study attempted to explore the representation of Islamophobia over the Internet with a rather precise look at the news via the commonly-viewed Yahoo site. To this end, four news reports from 25 countries in the Middle East and Asia were randomly selected between June 15 2013 and August 15 2013 in this site. After analyzing the reports at the word, sentence, paragraph, and graphic levels, the moves implied were identified. Also, applying Fairclough model of critical discourse analysis, the news reports were analyzed at micro and macro levels. For the former, the lexical choice, genre choice, and picture choice and for the latter, access, power and ideology issues were investigated. Furthermore, four major themes of violence, aggression, terrorism, and extremism, and five minor themes of monolithic, discrimination, backwardness, barbarism, and lawlessness were identified. The findings indicated that the above-mentioned site (out of six commonly-viewed sites), unintentionally or on purpose, impose the colonial ideology of the west to the world media and introduced Islam as a religion of violence, aggression, extremism, terrorism, monolithic, backwardness, and barbarism via the copious use of negative-carrying-burden lexicon, texts, graphics, and videos. In this regard, it is suggested that the world of Islam be conscious of these false propaganda against Islam and take appropriate and timely measures so that they could introduce the true nature of this holy religion to the world and reduce the number of Islamophobic attacks on the Muslim community throughout the world.