A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ON FOXNEWS REPORTS 6 & 7 FEBRUARY 2012

Abstract

This research deals with critical discourse analysis in order to explore how the language is used as the instrument of the media and construct the public opinion. The writer analyzed the texts using a critical discourse analysis developed by Norman Fairclough. A Critical Discourse Analysis itself is a study that is focused to explore the relationship between discourse, events and texts. The writer took two articles which report United States’ new sanctions on Iran published by Foxnews.com as the data of analysis. They were (a) “US Imposes Additional Sanction on Iran”; this article was published on February 06, 2012 and (b) “New US sanctions on Iran aim to head off Israel”; this article was published on February 7, 2012. Fox News’s reports, which had been indicated by some researcher, are aligned to the U.S government. They accused Fox News had a bias in reporting the information. Basically, media bring the information for the masses and they transfer it using language. They share their opinion and assumption. They also have manipulated their opinion or assumption as the information or knowledge for the society. Sometimes, people take for granted the issues as the actual information. They do not want to gain more information about them. This research is applied a qualitative research method. During the process of research, I examined a qualitative documents. Here, I examined two articles in Fox News’ webpage that have same issue as the data of analysis. The data were collected by using non-experimental sampling. This sampling method was used in a certain or an interesting case, such as the issue of United States’ new sanctions on Iran that is reported by Fox News’s articles. vii ` Later on, in conducting this research, the writer used the second dimension of Fairclough’s notion about a critical discourse analysis. It is the analysis of discourse practice. Here, this research can also be called as an intertextual analysis of text. This is an interpretative art which depends on the analyst's judgment and experience. By doing this analysis, this research also aims to show how texts describe orders of discourse. The order of discourse can be known as the form of discourse in text which influences the meaning of text. They are genres, voices, and representations. The finding of this research indicates that there is an authority or power that controls the spread of information through the media texts, including news online text reports. The form of discourse in text, such as genres, voices, and representations, has been integrated to fulfill the order of discourse. Thus, this construction should be asked and interrogated to reveal the truth. Moreover, this research gave contribution to show that this also proved that language analysis by involving social context will give more valid result.