POST - OBL DISCOURSE IN PAKISTANI MEDIA: AN ANALYSIS OF NEWS REPORTS BY DAWN & THE NEWS

Farhat Jabeen1  and Muhammad Rashid Mahmood2

ABSTRACT

The aim of this study is to critically analyze the discourse that evolved in Pakistani newspapers immediately after the death of Osama bin Laden (OBL). For this purpose, two Pakistani newspapers The News and Dawn’s news stories were selected. All the selected stories portray the first response of Pakistani print media in the wake of OBL’s death. The reason for choosing these particular papers was their conflicting political inclinations. A mini corpus comprising of all those news items was built which was later processed to locate keywords with the help of WordSmith Tools 4.0. These keywords were studied to find out how OBL’s death was reported in our selected newspapers. The results show that there is a clear difference in each newspaper’s slant. A noteworthy point is that Pakistani print media have borrowed and then owned the term of “Islamic terrorism” from western media. Moreover, it appears that there are pro-Taliban tendencies in Pakistani print media as depicted by the choice of lexical items in the news reports.   


KEYWORDS: CDA, news reports, OBL, media discourse