The Construction of Threat of “Islamist Terrorism” in German Newspapers

2 | 1 | 2022

“…Positive-self and negative-other representations as well as political argumentation may rationalize war without drawing attention to the violence it brings. In other words, a positive and superior image of 'self' antagonising the negative image of 'other' creates a need for conflict (Bicer, Brink, Camacho 2022;Partington 2015;Shaheen, Tarique 2022).…”

“…In total, the corpus consists of 68 articles with 62,319 word tokens (The Guardian -24 articles, 20,929 words; TSN -23 articles, 20,647 words; RT -21 articles, 20,743 words). Similar to most recent corpus studies investigating war and conflict media representation (Bicer, Brink, Camacho 2022;Oktavianti, Adnan 2020;Sahlane 2022), the current study is confined to op-eds due to their communicative purpose and their sub-register which tends to explicitly articulate the author's opinion and attitude toward the issue in question. The op-ed section of periodicals represents the opinion genre and includes letters to the editor, leader articles/editorials, and commentaries (Bednarek, Caple 2012).…”