News-Media and Transformation of Reality during the Egyptian Revolution

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2011 in the subject Communications - Journalism, Journalism Professions, grade: 16/20, , course: Discourse Analysis End of Studies Seminar., language: English, abstract: The present study endeavours to investigate the effects of journalistic discourse on the perception of reality. More precisely, it attempts to demonstrate how different ways to report the same events may lead to different constructions of social reality. The major aim of this research is to depict the strategies used by AlJazeera and NileTV during their coverage of the events of the Egyptian revolution of the 25th January 2011, the ideological purposes behind the use of these strategies and how they end up constructing different versions of reality. In this regard, Critical Discourse Analysis is used as a method of analysis, to uncover the ways social realities are constructed discursively via the news media. This research paper is organized as follows: the first chapter presents the major concepts related to the functionalist view of discourse, as well as all the key concepts related to journalistic discourse, namely, capitalism, power, ideology, hegemony, journalism, objectivity, discursive practices, propaganda, audience and headlines. The second chapter presents the research methodology, which involves the purpose, the rationale, the research questions and hypotheses, as well as the pilot study and the methods of data collection and analysis. Finally the third chapter presents the analysis of fourteen headlines from both the English and Arabic versions of the websites of AlJazeera and NileTV on their coverage of the Egyptian revolution (25th of January 2011)