Exploring the Political Parallelism discourse on Representation of Islam and Muslims in the Australian Press

Abstract

Recent research has revealed a prominent ‘political parallelism’ discourse in the coverage of Islam and Muslims by international media. The studies have evidenced that the coverage of Islam and Muslims is widely influenced by the ideological leanings of the newspapers. This paper is set to explore whether the ideological differences of the Australian newspapers are reflected in the coverage of Islam and Muslims from January 1, 2016, to March 31, 2017. Employing Van Dijk’s (1998) ideological square and lexicalization approaches within the CDA paradigm this study examined editorials from two leading Australian newspapers. The findings have validated the existence of the ‘political parallelism’ discourse in the editorial contents of the selected newspapers representing Islam and Muslims.

Islamophobic Discourses in the Print media of Pakistan: Evidence from Tehreek-E-Labbaik Pakistan Sit-In

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Trump and Muslims: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Islamophobic Rhetoric in Donald Trump’s Selected Tweets

“…This said model comprises 25 key terms or rhetorical discursive strategies including " Actor description, authority, burden, categorization, comparison, consensus, counterfactual, disclaimer, euphemism, evidentiality, argumentation, illustration/example, generalization, hyperbole, implication, irony, lexicalization, metaphor, national self-glorification, norm expression, number game, polarization (us-them), populism, presupposition, vagueness, and victimization" (van Dijk, 1998. Recent studies (Adegoju & Oyebode, 2015;Afzal & Harun, 2020;Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Díez-Prados, 2014;Fallah et al, 2019;Ghauri, 2019;Ghauri & Umber, 2019;Joharchi & Najibi, 2016;Kadkhodaee & Ghasemi Tari, 2019;Mazid, 2008;Reynolds, 2018) suggest that this framework is a combination of different frameworks in CDA (Chilton, 2004;Van Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999;Wodak & Reisigl, 2003) and is suitable and useful to analyze discourses of politics and media where the binaries of "self" versus "other" are prominent. Moreover, when it comes to sampling, Baker ( 2006), Waikar (2018), Sandelowski (1995), Cleary et al (2014), Robinson (2014), Byrne (2001), Borrego et al (2009), Silverman ( 2016), Creswell and Creswell (2017), and Khan et al (2019) postulated that in discourse studies sample for the analysis is chosen on the basis of key words provided by the text under analysis.…”

Exploring the ‘Civil Repair’ Function of Media: A Case Study of The Christchurch Mosques Shootings

“…The Christchurch mosques shootings is not a single incident of its kind rather in quite a recent past there had been a Quebec City mosque shooting in 2017, London Bridge attack in 2017, Copenhagen shootings in 2015 and the Charlie Hebdo attack in 2015 which stunned the whole world. Media all around the world gave specific attention and produced certain kinds of discourses on the incidents ranging from a 'solidarity discourse' Luengo & Ihlebaek, 2019;Ghauri, 2017) to a variety of binary discourses like; 'othering' (Umber, Ghauri & Haq, 2021;, 'Securitization' (Ghauri, Umber & Warrich, 2020;Tsagarousianou, 2016;Mertens & Smaele, 2016;Cesari, 2010), 'political parallelism' Ghauri, 2019a;2019b;Ghauri & Yousaf, 2018;Ghauri, 2018;Tsagarousianou, 2016;Mertens & Smaele, 2016). In such scenarios of conflict, especially within a country, the binary discourses produced by the local press is an act equal to pouring oil on fire.…”