Discourse Analysis of The Guardian and Dawn Editorials: Framing the Language of the Palestine-Israel Conflict

Abstract

This research examines how the UK’s prestigious newspaper Guardian and Pakistan’s prestigious English newspaper Dawn employs language and discourse in their editorials dated October 8 to November 8, 2023, framing the severe Israel-Palestine conflict. This research examines that each editorial of each newspaper explains, creates meaning, perspective and presented the intense Hamas attack of 7 October 2023. Qualitative Analysis was used to analyze all the editorials. The Study mainly analyzed language patterns, metaphors and main themes of the content of the editorials. Editorials in Dawn often use highly charged, emotive language to describe Israeli actions as genocidal and Palestinians as victims. Dawn uses highly emotional words in the language of their editorials to represent Israeli’s as a Genocidal force and Palestinians as Victims while on the other hand The Guardian uses calm and simpler language while addressing the same incident. This approach tries to be balanced and fair, but Dawn emphasizes Palestinian injustices and historical colonialism, reflecting its readership and offering a perspective that highlights power imbalances in the conflict. The Comparison in this study shows how certain factors like political views and editorial style frames the situation through the use of language and how it affects the public perception about certain conflict, its reasons, and possible outcomes. The article concludes by emphasizing the significant influence of the media in framing a narrative of conflict and the inherent problems in reporting highly asymmetric conflict. The findings also clearly show each newspaper frames the conflict differently through selective keywords and imagery.