Egyptian Events Through British Lenses: Framing Ideologies Through Language

Mass media plays a fundamental role in creating ideologies and identities in our contemporary world. This study combines corpus linguistics analysis with Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Entman’s Framing theory to study the representation of events in Egypt 2011, referred to as the Egyptian Revolution. Combining these two methods with the framing theory helps in identifying multiple linguistic mechanisms employed by the Left-leaning and Right-leaning UK tabloids and broadsheets in promoting their different representations of the events in Egypt at that time. Based on the number of articles published in 2011 about the subject, the study concludes that Left-leaning newspapers, The Guardian, Observer, Mirror, and Mirror on Sunday, devoted more space to the Egyptian Revolution than Right-leaning ones, The Times, Sunday Times, Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. Taking a view of framing as sizing (Entman, 1991) and as involving selection and salience according to Entman (1993, 2010), we show that the Left-leaning newspapers frame the revolution positively, by highlighting the role of protesters, activists, youth and social media. On the other hand, the Right-leaning newspapers talk more negatively about the revolution using keywords like ‘crisis’, ‘threat to stability’ and ‘turmoil’, to name just a few. The study specifically identified what Fairclough (2010) calls Ideological Discursive Formations (IDF) that are dominant in the Left-leaning and Right-leaning newspapers