Critical Discourse Analysis of Selected Newspaper Articles Addressing the Chapel Hill Shooting Incident

Sayyah Al-Ahmad & Rawan Abu Awwad
Yarmouk University, Jordan

The present study critically investigates the single case media reporting of the Chapel Hill shooting incident in North Carolina, USA. Eight newspaper reports, including BBC, Fox News, Independent, The Telegraph, The New York Times, Huffington Post, and among which two from CNN were assessed, using the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach. At the explanation level, a social analysis was conducted to the order of discourse, which was connected to a specific social order to produce the final texts of the report. The findings of the study revealed that the reports were not objective. They were found to be linguistically biased as the incident was portrayed as an un-Islamophobic crime. These results also confirmed the revelations in other studies regarding the representation of Muslims by the Western media and the ‘elite racism’ ideology, which was followed in the production of reports.

Keywords: Agency, Chapel Hill, critical discourse analysis, ideology, modality, racism

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Sayyah Al-Ahmad (Ph.D., Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2003) is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Linguistics in English Department at Yarmouk University in Jordan. His areas of research interest include language learning, written corrective feedback, discourse analysis, and pragmatics.
Rawan Abu Awwad was a graduate student in the English Department at Yarmouk University. She graduated from the university with a Master degree in linguistics. Her research focuses on discourse analysis.