Bangladesh Political Crisis: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Global Print Media Reporting

Abstract

News reports represent the political position or ideological stance and affects the readers' idea about the event; and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has been widely used to analyse news reports since 1970s (Yu & Zheng, 2022). The purpose of the study is to analyse the various representations of the Bangladeshi political situation in the newspapers around the world.  The theoretical framework used in the study is Van Dijk’s ideological square of CDA which comprises discourse structures, cognition and society. Micro-level discourse structures direct the study towards macro-level of social cognition. Eight newspaper articles are selected. The study explores the foregrounded or backgrounded elements in news in paradigm of different socio-political world perspectives through framing. The concept of framing constructed through polarity (positive or negative word choice), metaphors, labelling (to put emphasis) and categorization has been analyzed. The study reveals the perspectives through ideological deconstruction by making use of framing. The results from the framing and textual analysis of newspaper indicate the differences in the representation of the same news by multiple news sources. The study indicates that ideological square model is useful to elucidate discourse strategies which fabricate the concept of framing by identifying tinges in discursive construction of an intended perspective.