A Comparative Study of Lexical Choices and Syntactic Structures in the Editorials of The News and Dawn

The purpose of the present study is to discover the hidden agendas or ideologies of the newspapers, The News and Dawn, by critically analyzing their choice of lexical items and syntactic structures while drafting their editorials. For this analysis, the researchers choose thirty editorials from both of the newspapers, i.e., The News and Dawn, on the same issues or subject matters. This strategy of choosing editorials on similar issues or subject matters helps the researchers to discover the choice of language by both editors on the basis of their organizational agendas. For the analysis of the language used in the editorials, the researchers use van Dijk’s media discourse framework. The researchers found that The News used vague and unspecific forms of language making the news misleading and ambiguous for the readers, however, on the other hand, Dawn used a quite simple form of language to communicate its stance on the subjects in question as far as the editorials under study were concerned.