"USE OF PASSIVE STRUCTURES TO CONCEAL AGENCY IN PAKISTANI POLITICAL NEWS: A CDA APPROACH"

Abstract

This paper employs Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with the findings of the three dimensional model provided by Fairclough (1995) to analyze passive grammatical structures in Pakistani political news to reveal the concealed agency and the diminished accountability. To conceal accountability in stories about protests, security operations, governance failures, economic policies and judicial decisions, editorial pressure, self censorship and ownership interests in the politically constrained media environment of Pakistan, journalists often end up astray in their docket by relying on agentless passives and nominalization to deliver the message. The analysis of headlines and news leads of the largest English or Urdu newspapers, including Dawn, The News, Express Tribune, and Jang, in terms of qualitative analysis provides the researcher with the identification of recurrent patterns where passive constructions are used to depoliticize sensitive events and to rationalize the actions of the states. The sentences such as dozens of PTI workers were arrested or dozens of people had been killed during security operation are processes in which the institutional agency is bypassed and political actions are represented as impersonal, not willful. Such language preferences at the discursive and social stages would conform to the existing power relations, bottom-up elite domination, and de-democratizing measures. It is concluded that passive structures in the Pakistani political journalism serve as an ideological mechanism of forming the perception in the population oriented to maintaining the status quo and restricting the debate around critical democratic issues.