The 24th of February 2022, Russian President Speech, and its Interpretation and Representation in News Reports: Corpus Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis Approach

Abstract

The present study adopts a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis (CDA) in the investigation of online news articles in major news portals and their presentation and interpretations of the 24th February 2022, Russian President’s speech. Through the analysis of eight online news articles from eight news outlets namely: The Washington Post, The Times of India, CGTN, The Guardian, The Toronto Star, Russia Today, Tehran Times, and Al Jazeera, the aim of this research is to demonstrate how the linguistic behavior of the selected articles. Likewise, it explores, ideology, power dynamics, and bias in the production of discourse to report the Russian President speech. Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of CDA is taken as a theoretical framework to examine quantitatively and qualitatively the discursive practices namely reporting verbs, labeling, news sources, and negative framing in order to showcase the news outlet’s bias toward their countries’ ideological and political orientations. The study found that all of the selected articles displayed variation and imbalance, indicating that the presented discourse was aligned with the respective governments' stances on the issue under study.