Journal of
Languages and Culture

  • Abbreviation: J. Lang. Cult.
  • Language: English
  • ISSN: 2141-6540
  • DOI: 10.5897/JLC
  • Start Year: 2010
  • Published Articles: 132

Article in Press

Portrayal of Balochistan’s Terrorism in National and Regional Press: A Critical Discourse Analysis of English and Urdu Newspapers

Sajjad Ahmed Paracha, Kalwar Munwar Ali

  •  Received: 10 July 2019
  •  Accepted: 10 July 2019
This research evaluates the reporting of major bomb blasts in Balochistan. It analyses that how national and regional print media of Pakistan is handling and reporting certain terrorist events. One English and Urdu newspapers from national and one each from regional newspapers have been selected (English Dawn and Urdu Jang are national and English The Baluchistan Times and Urdu The Zammana are regional newspapers). Word of newspaper is the unit of analysis. To conduct this pilot research, the period from January 1, 2015 to April 30, 2015, have been chosen. The sample of national Urdu Jang is of six months because this newspaper covers very less news items regarding Balochistan. This is a comparative study. To reveal the ideology behind the selection of words by fours newspapers, Critical Discourse Analysis method is used. Corpora of four newspapers were collected. Corpora of four newspapers were analyzed by Word Smith Tools 6.0. tool. News discourse regarding terrorism in Balochistan was constructed differently by four newspapers as a result of their clashing ideologies.First, although the three corpora shared a lot of commonalities in word frequency, differences still exist in several high ranking lemmas. On the one hand, words such as “Balochi” and “terrorism” ranked similarly in the three corpora’s lexical frequency lists; on the other hand, the frequencies of the lemma “BLA/BRA” were much higher in Dawn corpus than in the regional English national The Baluchistan Times and Urdu daily The Zammana. Corpus indicated that the image of the BRA and BLA received more attention in the reports by Dawn than in those by three newspapers.

Keywords: Balochistan, Collocation, Corpus linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Terrorism