Trivializing the Crime through Indifference: A Critical Discourse Analysis of News Headlines on the Assassination of Afzal Kohistani
Keywords:
Critical Discourse Analysis, News reporting, Afzal Kohistani, Honour killing, StyleAbstract
The style that newspaper headlines carry has a great contribution in determining the importance of an event. It is hypothesized that with the help of styling/framing and the language used in these reports, the least important story could be turned into a top story and similarly a very important issue could be sidelined. The present study investigates the news related to the assassination of Afzal Kohistani who raised his voice against the honour killing in Kohistan. The study aims at identifying the various linguistic features used by the main stream print media about the assassination of Afzal Kohistani. Furthermore, the study unveils the effect of such linguistic choices on meaning projection. The data has been gathered from five local newspapers that reported the news of Afzal Kohistani’s assassination on 7th March, 2019. The critical discourse analysis provides the theoretical underpinning; furthermore, Van Dijk (1994) and Olowe (1993) approaches have been used for the data analysis. The finding establishes that the topic is trivialized despite the importance of the issue. Moreover, the intensity of the incident is toned down by the indifferent approach of some reporting agencies.
Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, News reporting, Afzal Kohistani, Honour killing, Style
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