Critical Discourse Analysis of News Headlines in the New York Times and the Times

Natasa Stojan
University of Split, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Poljička Cesta 35, 21000 Split, Croatia

Abstract

Health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s aggression against Ukraine have affected countries all over the world in the last couple of years. Dramatical changes have occurred in many countries which have been faced with various crises: health, energy, economic, financial, political. This study analyses news headlines published in September 2022 in two established online newspapers, The New York Times and The Times. The aim of the paper is to analyse a sample of headlines that deal with various aspects of the global economic, financial and energy crisis, that are framed in two different social and cultural contexts, in the USA and the U.K. The methodological procedure applied in this qualitative- quantitative study comprises two levels of analysis, linguistic and intertextual, based on the model of Critical Discourse Analysis, developed by Norman Fairclough. The role of the media is to provide true, unbiased and reliable facts, which should be respected particularly during a severe crisis, so that people could critically evaluate available information. Particular prominence is given to newspaper headlines in this study since their function is to summarize the main content of the newspaper text, to indicate the topic, attract readers’ attention and evoke particular cultural context. Our analysis is based partly on lexico-grammatical structures used in the headlines and partly on discourse practices of the newspapers in different cultural contexts, with the aim of finding out how certain linguistic features are used as discursive enactment of sociocultural practices.

Presentation