A Comparative Linguistic Study of Objeetivity and Prejudice in Media Disecourse

Abstract

This article attempts to investigate bias in Arabic and English newspaper reports. To this end, six news reports, three in each language, were analyzed with an eye to ascertaining the linguistic, stylistic and discoursal features authors employ to express bias in this genre. To control the topic variable, the three reports in each language are about the same event (i.e. topic). It was found that bias in news reporting is a universal issue and authors in the two languages involved utilize similar linguistic, stylistic and discoursal tools in realizing it. The article concludes with emphasizing the importance of teaching media and language students newspaper texts so they can lean how to read (between and ‘beyond’ the lines) and eventually detect bias in this genre so they can understand the linguistic and socio-cultural differences in this respect.