Libya, the media and the language of violence: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The Arab revolution euphoria of 2011 was covered around the clock by different media sites, engaging millions of followers around the world, and eventually turning into discontent in some affected countries. This study examines the outcomes of the Libyan uprising (2011–2015), specifically the topics of civil-war and terrorism, through the lenses of the Arab written media in Arabic (Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya), the Arab written media in English (Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya), and the Western written media in English (BBC and CNN). Through Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis (CADS), integrating discursive news values analysis (DNVA), this study highlights the ideological representations of these media, and examines their similarities and differences in terms of frequency distribution and story content. The findings indicate that the media coverage of the outcomes of the Libyan Revolution, when reporting on the topics of war and terrorism, follow similar directions in the story content and the frequency distribution, with some differences in the latter between the analysed media sites. Also, the collocations, concordances, and DNVA results, especially NEGATIVITY, IMPACT and ELITENESS, prove the emphasis of the media on violent language, making terrorism appear the norm, and thus manipulating the audience and affecting their understanding of the news.