Abstract

Institutions or people can express their political stances or attitudes toward a specific topic if they keep using some words rather than others repetitively and consistently. This study uses the corpus linguistic technique of frequency to examine the influence of the country where the newspaper is published on its agenda and coverage using a corpus of about 7 million words of news articles about Libya and Qaddafi in the Guardian (Britain) and the New York Times (the U.S.) from 2009 to 2013. The compiled corpus is divided into three time periods, namely: before, during, and after the 2011 Arab uprisings. The analysis shows that the two newspapers had different news foci/themes in the three investigated time periods, and that they are influenced by the stock of ideas circulating in the culture in which they are working. Both newspapers covered more news of events that draw the attention of the people of the countries where they are located and published. The paper concludes that there is a strong relationship between media and politics where media is a central arena for viewing the political events.

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