News Framing of the Arab Spring Conflict from the Lens of Newspaper Editorials
- Naeem Afzal
- Minah Harun
Abstract
News framing of events often restricts us to either ‘oppose’ or ‘favour’ a particular side/party involved in a conflict. This paper examines the print media framing of the Arab Spring in the editorials of The News International (NI) of Pakistan and Arab News (AN) of Saudi Arabia. The coverage sample consists of newspaper editorials published from January 2011 to December 2012 when the uprising received phenomenal attention from the media worldwide. Qualitative content analysis of 48 newspaper editorials (24 NI/24 AN), demonstrates how senior media workers constructed the Arab Spring as an international conflict. Specifically, the lexical choices of editorial writers reveal that mainstream newspapers in both the countries positively framed the pro-Arab Spring protesters (public), who reportedly desired to bring the ‘change’. On the contrary, the media framing of the uprising also reflects that the newspapers negatively framed the anti-Arab Spring authorities (ruling elite), who reportedly resisted the ‘change’. A future research is recommended to investigate readers’ perspectives, as well, on the media portrayals of the Arab Spring or other similar conflicts which can give insights into how language use can impact and is impacted by ideology, cultural nuances and identity of diverse individuals.
- Full Text: PDF
- DOI:10.5539/ijel.v10n1p352
Journal Metrics
Google-based Impact Factor (2021): 1.43
h-index (July 2022): 45
i10-index (July 2022): 283
h5-index (2017-2021): 25
h5-median (2017-2021): 37
Index
- Academic Journals Database
- ANVUR (Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes)
- CNKI Scholar
- CrossRef
- Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA)
- IBZ Online
- JournalTOCs
- Linguistic Bibliography
- Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts
- LOCKSS
- MIAR
- MLA International Bibliography
- PKP Open Archives Harvester
- Scilit
- Semantic Scholar
- SHERPA/RoMEO
- UCR Library
Contact
- Diana XuEditorial Assistant
- ijel@ccsenet.org