War and Conflicting Voices: Attitudinal Analysis of Chinese and British News Reports on the Israel-Gaza War

Abstract

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East stands out as one of the most enduring and complex disputes of the 21st century. Despite being the central focus of world political discussions, this conflict has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. Therefore, this study investigates attitudinal devices used in the coverage of the Israel-Gaza war in China and Britain, using the appraisal theory of Martin and White (2005). This study aims to reveal the potential bias in media reports by analysing the frequency and type of the three attitudinal devices, i.e., affect, judgment, and appreciation, in 80 news reports from China Daily and BBC. The study utilised a qualitative corpus-based approach using the UAM Corpus Tool 6. The findings show that the two media use all types of attitudinal devices, but there were notable differences in their application of affect, judgment, and appreciation. While China Daily mainly uses appreciation devices, focusing on evaluating events and objects, the BBC uses more judgment devices, emphasising ethical evaluation and social norms. This variation indicates that while the Chinese media tends to focus on the evaluation of events and objects to maintain objectivity, the BBC emphasises ethical and normative assessments, reflecting a cultural inclination towards moral and legal scrutiny. In addition, the BBC shows more negative attitudes and criticism than China Daily, indicating a stance of non-support in their coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict. These results underscore the important role of media in shaping public perception and highlight the need for critical news consumption when interpreting media coverage and cross-cultural narratives. The study’s findings further suggest that news organisations should strive to achieve greater objectivity in their news coverage by developing greater awareness of evaluative language in news texts.