The Constructions of Donald Trump's Muslim Travel Ban Policies by The New York Times and by Al Jazeera

Abstract

This research aims to know the constructions were used by The New York Times and Al Jazeera in reporting the same phenomenon of Donald Trump's Muslim Travel Ban Policies. In this case, there are many controversies occur in America which support or even criticize Donald Trump’s Muslim Travel Ban Policies. Thus, it is important to know how the media report the news with a certain perspective by analyzing news discourse. Therefore, this research uses Three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis by Fairclough (1995)as the main theory to conduct this research. The first dimension is used to know what language features could be found in the news. The second dimension is applied to investigate how the media report their news. While, the third dimension describes how the powers exist in society interpret and spread the dominant ideology to the community. The data of this study uses qualitative data in which the data is in the form of clauses taken from news text fragments which show the supporting constructions and criticizing constructions of Donald Trump Muslim Travel Ban Policies news. The clauses are taken from the news texts accessed through the official websites of The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com and https://www.aljazeera.com . Furthermore, the data is processed by reducing the data through two processes: (1) cutting off the data that was not in accordance with the problem formulations, and (2) Putting data in the table to classify the types of linguistic features. Data analysis was carried out using the Fairclough CDA approach to explain the language features (diction, active-passive, the use of modal verbs, and choices of news sources) to construct the attitudes and views of the two media (The New York Times and Al Jazeera). The results of this study indicate that The New York Times tends to use supporting constructions by placing Muslim Ban as Donald Trump's attempt to protect and maintain the security of the United States from immigrants originating from Muslim-majority countries. Meanwhile, Al Jazeera tends to use constructions to criticize by positioning Donald Trump's statement as a violation of human rights and freedoms for Muslim communities, especially immigrants who come from countries covered by Muslim Ban.