The Representation of ISIS in The American Newspapers: A Critical Discourse Analysis

This study deals with media representations to investigate how ISIS is represented in the articles of the Washington Post and New York Times. By employing mixed methods research: quantitative and qualitative approaches, this study looks into twenty articles that are selected from both newspapers. Analyzing these news articles will be done using van Leeuwen’s (2008) Social Actor Approach to discover the representation of ISIS and investigate how it is realized linguistically by uncovering possible underlying ideologies. The analysis shows that the given newspapers have represented ISIS similarly with the same linguistic strategies. As such, with the same ideological orientation. They depict ISIS as active dynamic social actor. Additionally, ISIS is portrayed as powerful social actor, and therefore, as the negative-other representation.