The representation of ISIS in the American newspapers in terms of van leeuwen’s social actor approach : a critical discourse analysis

Abstract EN

The emergence of ‘the Islamic state of Iraq and Syria’ (ISIS) was surprising not only because of its rapid expansion geographically across Syria and Iraq, but also because of its global influence.

That is represented in its ability to attract large numbers of volunteers, from almost all around the world.Since June 2014 when Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, leader of ISIS, ceremoniously declared the formation of the Caliphate and himself as the self-proclaimed Caliph, the international media has reported on this group that become the talk of media, especially American media.

This interest has motivated and drawn the attention of the researcher to study and analyze the image of ISIS in the New York Times (NYT) to show how it represents this organization linguistically by uncovering possible underlying ideologies.This study looks into 20 articles and analyzes these news articles will be done using van Leeuwen’s (2008) Social Actor Approach.

The analysis shows that the NYThas represented ISIS as an active dynamic social actor.

Additionally, ISIS is portrayed as powerful social actor, and therefore, as the negative-other representation.