Power, Proximity, and Perspective: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Pakistani and International Media Framing

Abstract

With the increasing polarization of the media worldwide, the same geopolitical event could be discursively represented in completely different ways depending on the reporting context and who reports it. This difference raises the question of the role of national and international media in shaping public opinion through linguistic construction. In this paper, the ideological positioning of Pakistani print media within the international news reports on the same events has been analyzed. Thus, it is planned to fill the gap in CDA studies, which have considered domestic and international media as occupying two distinct ideological poles. For this purpose, the comparative critical discourse analysis of six headlines was conducted in three tracks: the Beijing Summit, the ban on social media in Pakistan, and the funeral of Iran's Supreme Leader. Fairclough's Three-dimensional model, as well as Van Dijk's socio-cognitive ideological square, are employed together to examine transitivity, modality, nominalization, and positive Self/negative Other construction. The study shows that there exists an ideological difference among Pakistan-based media organizations due to socio-cognitive mental models related to the particular issues in question.