The Representation of “Black Lives Matter” Movement in American and British Broadsheets: The New York Times and The Guardian
Loading...
Date
2021
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Mouloud Mammeri University OF Tizi-Ouzou
Abstract
The present study deals with Multimodal Semiotic Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis of ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement’s representation in two popular broadsheets in the UK and The USA namely: The Guardian and The New York Times. The corpus of the study consists of ten news articles as well as ten images of BLM protesters. This research seeks to reach two objectives. First, to analyze the visual modes used to portray the BLM movement in the two western broadsheets: The Guardian and The New York Times relying on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s framework of the Grammar of Visual Design (1996, 2006) to analyze images, and Critical Discourse Analysis model proposed by Fairclough (1989, 1992) to analyze news articles. Second, to determine the way ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement is represented in the two newspapers, positively or not. To achieve these objectives, the mixed method research which integrates both qualitative and quantitative research techniques is adopted. The analysis of the selected news articles has revealed that racism and police brutality have been continued and this is realized through the use of various linguistic resources such as: synonyms, antonyms, and informality in the vocabulary category, and the system of transitivity in the grammatical category. In addition, the visual analysis of the selected images has shown that BLM protesters are depicted as actors involved in different actions and events. Therefore, The Guardian and The New York Times support BLM movement by providing a positive portrayal of the black protesters both visually and linguistically.
Description
59p. ; ill. en coul. ; 30cm+(cd)
Keywords
Black Lives Matter movement, Broadsheet, Critical Discourse Analysis, Grammar of Visual Design, Intertextuality, Multimodal Semiotic Analysis.
Citation
Didactics of Foreign Languages