A critical discourse analysis of a news report on two mosques shooting in Christchurch-New Zealand

Abstract

News reports are regarded as a reflection of world reality. People around the world are watching the news reports to get the first aid information about incidents or events they need. Hence, languages in the news reports are, of course, considered neutral, impartial, and unbiased. Thus, this paper attempts to provide a critical discourse analysis CDA of a news report in its online version taken from the Guardian newspaper regarding the mass shooting of the Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand. In this respect, Halliday’s systematic functional grammar is employed to explore the linguistic features along with two CDA’s tools (nominalization and passivization). Moreover, the researcher used these different tools of discourse analysis to unfold the use of biased language in this news report. For achieving this goal, the paper attempts to define some theoretical background of the CDA approach with its tools initially. Afterward, there is an interpretation and discussion of the analysis which is adopted based on CDA tools. However, the result of the analysis unfolded that Guardian news reports concerning the two Mosques shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand were not remained unbiased in reporting such sensitive issues. The implication for the journalists is to keep always their impartiality in advance while reporting any incidents or events.