Linguistic Manipulation as a Means of Sensationalism and Ideological Influence in Political News Reporting

Abstract

The present study analyzes the discursive strategies of manipulation in political news discourse which aims at achieving hidden interests under the veil of news coverage. It is a multidisciplinary study that adopts van Dijk's (2006) scheme of manipulation strategies at several levels of discourse (content, lexis, topics, syntax, rhetoric, and order of discourse). Specifically, the analysis is narrowed down to investigate the polarized attitudinal lexical items adopting Martin and White's (2005) Appraisal theory (Attitude category). The data consists of six target news reports classified into three pairs of articles that represent clearly opposed ideologies. All target reports cover the same political event. This systematically-selected data is an appropriate field for manifesting ideology which is the motive behind manipulation. The study concludes that five of target reports are ideologically-loaded texts and are geared towards either manipulation or persuasion. Both Al-Jazeera and SANA as Arabian news websites and Jerusalem post and Haaretz as Israeli news websites embody the Palestine-Israel conflict. Accordingly, their reports represent two conflicting ideologies each of which is manipulated to satisfy their opposed interests. Nevertheless, manipulation is not clearly manifested in Haaretz report which indicates that it is not necessarily for all ideological discourses to be manipulative but all manipulative discourses are fundamentally ideological. Reuters reports the event neutrally but CNN report is also manipulated for its own interest.