25th Jan Revolution in the Articles of New York Times: A Study in Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Journalists have covered the 25th January Egyptian revolution analyzing and expressing opinions. The thesis is concerned with the inconsistency of their stances and positions. More specifically, it investigates shifts in the political stances of American journalists during and post the January 25th Egyptian Revolution. The thesis adopts Fairclough’s (1992, 2010) three-dimension framework of discourse, together with, Fairclough & Fairclough’s (2012) argumentation model to investigate the corpus of the current work. The corpus incorporates ten articles, seven editorials and three op-ed articles, that are published in the American newspaper New York Times on the Egyptian revolution from January 25th, 2011 to March 31st, 2011. Analysis is conducted on three levels; textual, discursive and social. Results indicate that writers are bias, taking sides and changing them according to the changes of the events. Thus, the articles witness a gradual change of stance from the pro-Mubarak and anti-revolution stances to the anti-Mubarak and pro-revolution stances.