Editorials of Pakistani English Print Media: Application of CDA

Abstract

The analysis aims to identify and explain how ideology is constructed and presented through language used in two Pakistani newspapers, viz., the Nation and the Dawn. Emphasis is placed on the construction of ideology using framework of analyzing media discourse given by van Dijk (1998) thus revealing the close relationship between language and ideology. The findings indicate that lexical choices and sentence structure in written text play a fundamental role in propagation and perpetuation of implicit and dominant ideologies and that there are certain ideological differences that are yielded either tacitly or overtly in newspaper editorials. The article is divided into four sections. The first section includes the introduction of the newspaper editorial. The next two sections describe what critical discourse analysis is, framework of Van Dijk’s media discourse model, brief history of the newspaper under investigation and an analysis of the data. The last section offers concluding remarks about the association between language and ideology.