An Ideological Discursive Analysis of Defamation in Selected English Newspapers

Abstract

There has been a continuous rise in the emergence of media, including print, audio, and visual forms such as newspapers, television, and radio. One of the forms of media is newspapers, which is used in an extensive way as a tool for damaging the reputation of others. This research conducts a critical discourse analysis of defamation in selected English newspapers. The researcher examines the syntactic and lexical features used in newspapers in conducting the act of defamation, as well as the ideologies embedded in these linguistic features. The researcher aims to discover the hidden ideologies that are embedded in language words and structure by conducting a critical discourse study. To conduct such a study, the researcher adopts an eclectic model consisting of Fairclough's three-dimensional model and van Dijk's ideological discursive strategies. The data are two cases taken from two English newspapers. The researcher concludes that defamatory articles contain syntactic features such as modality, word order and nominalization. Each of these strategies contains a specific ideology, such as criminalization and discrimination.