Critical Discourse Analysis of Newspapers: Case Study of Muslim Women Representation in British Newspapers

Abstract

This study uses critical discourse analysis to understand how Muslim women are portrayed in one of England's best-known newspapers, The Daily Telegraph. The texts are analyzed on the basis of Fairclough's three-dimensional model using description, interpretation and explanation and linguistic tools of the corpus. Critical Discourse Analysis will unveil the dialectical relationship between text, discourse and society. The analysis showed that the image of the Muslim woman is discursively distorted. The Daily Telegraph reports that she is a voiceless victim of her religion, weak and submissive and even a threat to the British way of life. Negative stereotypes reflect the conservative, secular-liberal and orientalist ideologies of The Telegraph.