An Investigation into Texture, Power and Ideology in Electronic News Articles

Abstract

It is widely believed that media texts are shaped by the wider social and cultural structures. Therefore, attaining a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of media reporting entails complete understanding of the social artifacts and the cultural structures. Using Critical Discourse Analysis and Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) models of cohesion, this study examines texture, power and ideology in an electronic news article. The analysis looked into the context to comprehensively examine the text. The analysis revealed that referencing and lexical cohesion are the writer’s preferred model of cohesion throughout the text. It is also apparent that substitution and ellipsis are unexpectedly popular, which reflect a speech-like style. The critical analysis reveals that the article has hidden ideological meanings and is being divided along some ideological lines to reflect the views of those whose interest is being served and those whose interest is being undermined. The writer used foregrounding and lexis to serve his ideology, and backgrounding and sometimes omission to undermine the ideologies of the ‘other’.