Investigating russia to day's counter -hegemonic political discourse over the syrian conflict:Aquantitative study

Abstract

This dissertation centers on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) and the way it applies to the discursive analysis of the political discourse of the news network Russia Today (RTTV) when covering the Syrian conflict. The purpose of this work is to prove whether this channel is actually counter-hegemonic or not; in case it is, how and what for? This study tries also to prove whether it is influential on the international scene through the Syrian conflict. We attempted to extend previous work on counter-hegemonic media which focused solely on describing how these worked in the age of globalization. We can mention Painter (2008) and Thussu (2007), for instance. This work adopted a qualitative method in the form of Halliday’s theory of Context of Situation (field, tenor, and mode) and the quantitative one, which is a common practice in media studies. The work concludes that RTTV’s discourse is counter-hegemony-laden; it opposes that of Western media about the Syrian conflict. This news channel is a strategic tool to make Russia’s perspectives heard worldwide.