Politics, Ideology and Print Media: A CDA of Newspapers’ Headlines

Abstract

The present study critically decodes the headlines of Pakistani-English newspapers to locate linguistic spin employing different political ideologies in the desired manner by the controlling groups. The headlines which appeared in the daily ‘Dawn’ and ‘Nation’ newspapers during the year 2014 have been categorised into various themes such as theme of politics, nationalism, internationalism, terrorism, and economics but in the present study, the researchers have only focused on the headlines carrying the topic of politics. In this regard, two headlines from each newspaper about the theme of politics have been randomly selected and analysed by employing Dijk’s (2006) analytical framework of critical discourse analysis (CDA). Additionally, the existing model of Dijk has been amended in accordance with the nature of the existing data. Therefore, four headlines from each newspaper randomly selected carrying political themes have been analysed to explore how different discursive techniques employed in the coinage of newspaper headlines (mis)represent the same political event differently. The researchers have investigated the print media coverage of the same event in both the newspapers’ headlines to lay bare how different discursive techniques are employed to represent the same news item by different ideological groups to propagate desired political ideologies. The findings of the study highlight that different discursive moves are used by print media to represent the same event differently to propagate desired ideology. That is how print media discourses represent certain people belonging to in/out-groups.