A Study Of Representation Of Islam And Muslims In American Media: CDA Approach

The subject of Islam and Muslims is not a newly emerging one.In the past three decades,the western media has widely focused on the reports of Islam and Muslims,making it currently fodder for front-page news all over the world.However,the image of Islam and Muslims that the media has presented is always distorted or negative with inaccuracy and partial information,constructing ideologically motivated versions of reality.To figure out the embedded ideology in the media,it is necessary to analyze how Islam and Muslims have been presented in the media.Discourse analysis has overt ideological aims.With these ideological aims,the discourse analysis itself is not about presentation but about representation of media.The critical period of discourse analysis,the late 1990s,draws upon a variety of analytical frameworks and approaches and thus formed Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA).Combining what Fairclough(2013:10)and Wodak&Meyer(2015:2)have suggested,as a systematic transdisciplinary analysis of relations between discourse and other social elements,CDA is problem-oriented and characterized in unfolding and unraveling hidden ideologies and power through its analysis and critique of social practice.This study makes an integrative theoretical framework,combining CDA with Fairclough’s textural analysis,Wodak’s discursive analysis and Van Dijk’s sociocognitive analysis,to explore linguistic features,discursive strategies and sociocognitive stigma behind the representation of Islam and Muslims in New York Times(NYT)reports over a 17 year period(from Jan.1st,2000 to Dec.31t).The methodology of this study is to combine qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis(CDA and Corpus Linguistics,hereafter CL).Specially,it will analyze keywords,collocation,clusters,semantic prosody as well as concordance in textural analysis,discursive analysis and sociocognitive analysis,with the help of statistical tests from CL.It should be noted that this study is corpus-based,rather than corpus-driven.With the sufficient linguistic evidences of misrepresentation,stereotypes and prejudice,such as unacclimatized outsider,turmoil-maker and negative receiver,this study shows that Islam and Muslims are facing the matter of being stigmatized by the media.Fortunately,the whole process of stigma hasn’t been completed due to the insufficient evidences of discrimination.Meanwhile,NYT and scholars are makingefforts to clarify and eliminate the misunderstandings in the past and transmit the rational interpretation to audiences.Lastly,as for the future prospects of this study,more cognitive methods should be applied to figure out the formation mechanism of stigma about Islam and Muslims.Also,more studies should be done to find the ways to alleviate and eliminate stigma from a linguistic perspective.