Critical Discourse Analysis of US Newspapers’ Representations of Pakistan

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the lexical choices used by The
Washington Post and The New York Times to portray Pakistan in the editorials.
It is based on critical discourse analysis of the newspapers’ text to reveal hidden
ideologies. The data was collected from 12th September 2001 to 31st December
2016. Total population of editorials of both the newspapers was 274, which were
downloaded from Lexis Nexis data base. Fourteen sentences from the
population were selected through multistage sampling technique. Fairclough’s
(1989, 1995) models were adopted to analyze the content by using an inductive
approach. The results showed that both the newspapers use derogatory and
offensive terms and phrases to portray Pakistan. It was concluded that media of
such nature is a gigantic contributor in developing a negative global image of
Pakistan.