Caught in the frame: A critical analysis of Australian media representations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict 2014–2015

Despite the many current conflicts in the Middle East and the world, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is still one of the most significant conflicts of the modern era. The reasons for this include the history and violence of this conflict and the lack of practical solutions for it. The significance of this conflict is reflected in its prevalence in many disciplines, such as political science and media studies. Related literature shows that Australian media coverage of this conflict has not been investigated thoroughly. Hence, this study attempts to bridge this gap in literature, aiming to identify how Australian media portray the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A sample of mainstream Australian print and online media was analysed. The sample included News Corp media (The Australian, the Herald Sun and news. com. au), Fairfax newspapers (The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald) and two news websites, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and Crikey. This study draws on Entman’s (1993, 2002) concept of framing as a crucial technique used to shape an event or issue, reflecting the power embedded in media texts. The Australian media corpora (consisting of 862,093 words) were created by uploading 1,201 news articles to online linguistic tool, Sketch Engine. These news articles, published in the sample of Australian media from January 2014 to June 2015, were examined using corpus-based analysis. By using critical discourse analysis (CDA), a small sample of the data was analysed to investigate the Australian media portrayal of the Israeli war on Gaza during July and August 2014