The Transitivity-Passivization Interface in Two Online Newspapers about The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Abstract

Mass media are often biased in reporting certain news. There will always be reason on why they report certain news besides the commercial benefit they will get. This phenomenon requires readers to be more aware and critical when getting information from the media. By using critical discourse analysis, this study attempts to draw comparison between two different newspapers to find how newspapers convey meaning through the news reporting. There are two tools of critical discourse analysis that will be used to conduct this analysis. They are the transitivity analysis on participants and processes, and passivization technique that is used by the newspapers. The news articles are the online edition taken from the Antara News, an Indonesian newspaper and the New York Post, an American newspaper. Both newspapers report the conflict of Israeli and Palestinian in the Third Gaza War in 2014. The result is interesting in that both newspapers emphasize different points about the conflict even though the event of the news is the same. How the newspapers use the choice of verbs, the sources to support information, and the words construction in reporting the events implicitly tell how newspapers position themselves in the issue.