FRAMING THE ISRAEL-PALESTINE CONFLICT IN MEDIA HEADLINES: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF WESTERN AND EASTERN PERSPECTIVES USING APPRAISAL AND TRANSITIVITY FRAMEWORKS

Abstract

Media headlines serve as powerful discursive tools that shape public perceptions of global conflicts. In the case of the Israel–Palestine conflict, divergent ideological narratives across Western and Eastern media often reflect distinct geopolitical alignments and cultural sympathies. This study investigates how headlines from selected Western and Eastern newspapers linguistically construct the conflict through Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (Transitivity) and Martin and White’s Appraisal Theory. A total of 600 headlines were analyzed using the UAM Corpus Tool, drawn from six newspapers—three Western (The Times, New York Times, Frankfurter Rundschau) and three Eastern (Arab News, Dawn, Tehran Times). The analysis focused on process types, participant roles, and attitudinal resources including affect, judgment, and appreciation.

Findings show that Western headlines predominantly employed material and verbal processes to assign agency to Israeli actors, using intensified judgmental language and mono-glossic engagement that privileged institutional voices. In contrast, Eastern headlines favored relational and existential processes that highlighted Palestinian suffering and moral framing, supported by higher lexical density (a greater ratio of content words to function words) and more academic vocabulary, alongside hetero-glossic engagement. These results reveal that headlines construct conflict ideologically through distinct linguistic strategies aligned with regional worldviews. The study underscores the role of language in reproducing geopolitical bias and aims to contribute to critical discourse scholarship and awareness of media framing practices.