Media’s objectivity has always been challenged. Studies have asserted that they do not reflect the realities of the world, but select information they report, selection of which could be ideological. Following Fairclough’s three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study analyzed the linguistic features that helped determine how the event was framed in local and international online news articles. These frames then led to the identification of ideologies in the corpora. This study attempted to elucidate the power of media in telling the story of the Marawi Siege, and examine how language reinforces media’s powerful ideologies. The analyses showed that the linguistic features common in the online news articles were the verb said, which revealed much of the agenda of the journalists’ sources of information; the nouns Marawi, Maute, and metaphors referring to Maute, which indicated the foci of the news articles. The siege was framed in both news sources as ISIS-inspired and a rebellion. Filipino journalists discussed the siege while exposing more political rifts in the country, while some international journalists considered the siege only as reinforcement act. The victim, hero, and villain frames were used in the representation of the social actors involved. Philippine news writers presented the siege more with political slant compared to international news writers who leaned towards religious extremism. The study implicates emphasis on CDA as it provides useful and systematic way to start raising people’s awareness of the biases and ideologies in news.
Philippine E-Journals
