A Discourse Analysis of the British Newspapers’ Coverage of Charlie Hebdo Attack

Abstract

This research dissertation critically analysed the discourse of Charlie Hebdo Attack 2015 which was regarded as a peak time for media coverage. We considered two mainstream British newspapers namely The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph and we explored how the two papers represented the event within their cultural settings, how language use satisfied the readership through particular ideological representation of Islam and Muslims as a terror threat and whether such representation is in some way related to the political orientation of the newspaper. The theoretical framework of this study was based on Halliday's transitivity model but also it drew on from Fairclough's socio-cultural model of CDA to explain the different ideologies in both newspapers. Analysis concerned forty four headlines and leads in articles published on the newspapers' official online websites.