Ideological Use of Rhetorical Structures in American Newspapers Reporting Human Rights Violations in Iraq
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Abstract
News outlets can manipulate media discourse to promote their hidden ideologies regarding specific cases, such as human rights. Language is no longer a mere means of communicating information; but it also generates and shapes the social interaction with such issues. That is, Language used in newspapers can influence the readers' view on the issues published in them. This could be achieved through the effective representation of these issues using linguistic structures and choices. Therefore, this study investigates the ideological use of rhetoric structures in selected American online newspapers (Washington Post and New York Times) reporting human rights violations through 2019 protests in Iraq as a Muslim and Middle East country. This study employed a qualitative approach to analysis 12 news articles, focused on metaphor, parallelism and hyperbole as rhetoric structures. The findings revealed that the American newspapers used the rhetorical structures based on their ideology in reporting the protests in Iraq, supporting Iraqi protesters and portraying them as the positive "Self," emphasizing their actions and calling for government change, while criminalizing the Iraqi government and its forces and portraying them as the negative "Other," de-emphasizing their reaction and violations against the protesters.
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