AGENCY AND ATTRIBUTION IN REPORTING THE ISRAEL–PALESTINE CONFLICT: A COMPARATIVE CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF BBC, AL JAZEERA, AND CNN

Abstract

Linguistic representations are a key part of the building of social reality, especially in the context of media discourse, in which linguistic decisions affect how people view political processes, institutional power, and social agents. This paper examines the linguistic construction of agency and attribution in international news of the provisional measures of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over South Africa application against Israel issued on 26 January 2024 under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The study works with an online news report corpus comprising of three reports per newspaper (BBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera) and a total of nine news reports (nine news URLs/texts) through an analysis conducted with the Fairclough (1995) Three-Dimensional Model of Critical Discourse Analysis applied with Halliday (2014) Systemic Functional Linguistics, specifically the transitivity framework. The analysis is centered on the agency construction, roles of participants, transitivity, active and passive voice, reporting verbs, source attribution, quotation practices, and lexical choices to explore how the responsibility, legitimacy, and institutional power are discursively expressed. The results indicate that despite the fact that all three news organizations covered the same judicial event, they used different language strategies that gave different meanings of responsibility and accountability. BBC mostly focused on institutional neutrality by focusing on balanced attribution, procedural framing, CNN focused more on legal coverage with explanatory contextualization and expert interpretation, and Al Jazeera foregrounded humanitarian issues and state responsibility by being more explicit about legal obligation. Differences in patterns of transitivity, the structure of participants, attribution, and the use of lexicon indicate that ideological representation is built based on nuanced linguistic decisions and not an editorial point of view. Combining Critical Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistics, the paper becomes a contribution to Applied Linguistics and Media Discourse Analysis as it shows how grammatical constructions and discursive practices construct competing discourses of international conflict. The results also indicate the need to critically evaluate linguistic representation in international journalism and offer an analytical replicable framework that can be used in future research that explores the issue of media discourse, ideology, and international conflict reporting.