Framing the 2023 Israeli-Palestinian conflict: a comparative corpus-based discourse analysis of the US, Arab and British press

Power relations and ideology shape discourse, especially when the same event is reported by newspapers situated in different political and historical contexts. In the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, discourse can be as intricate as the conflict itself, especially when both sides accuse the media of perpetrating ideologically charged narratives. This work aims to uncover and compare power relations and ideologies in the US, Arab and British press on the 2023-2024 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, covering a semester of news reporting from October 7th to April 7th. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as its theoretical framework, the study examines the representation of selected events and social actors in five prominent newspapers with distinct political stances: The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (US), Al-Jazeera English (Arab), The Guardian and The Times (British). The qualitative CDA methodology is integrated with a quantitative corpus-based analysis of 750 articles (150 articles per newspaper), compared by means of a linguistic analysis employing various discourse categories. Findings show substantial similarities in representation patterns among the four Western newspapers, which differ significantly from their Arab counterpart. This thesis provides a critical understanding of ideological bias in media representation of conflicts and suggests paths of further improvement for journalists through practices of self-reflection.