The Syrian Revolution: A Civil Struggle
The Syrian Revolution
The uprising in Syria is well known as an armed conflict between two sides: militaries loyal to Bashar Alasad’s government and the Al Ba'ath party, those who are seeking to overthrow the government. The conflict began on 15th March 2011, with widespread protests that increased nationwide in April 2011 (NYT, 2013)The Syrian uprising was one of the movements that began in North Africa and then spread into the Middle East. This was named: "The Arab spring."
After a month of the uprising, the Syrian army was used to silence the protests by using their military power to stop people who were demanding their civil rights. Armed forces fired at protestors across the country. As a result, the conflict deepened with clashes taking place in towns and cities across the country. The United Nations reported that about 120,000 people had been killed by September 2013. The number of refugees was approximately 3 million, and more than one million were left in horrible living conditions with shortages of food and drinking water. The Syrian conflict seems to be more severe as some reports have shown evidence of the use of chemical attacks (NYT, 2013a; watch, 2011)
The Ghouta chemical attack
The Ghouta chemical attack occurred on the 21st of August 2013 during the Syrian uprising when several opposition members took control of areas of Ghouta; these are the suburbs around Damascus. Hundreds were killed in the attack which took place in the early hours of the morning between 02:00hrs and 05:00hrs on the 21st of August 2013. (Chulov, 2013; Fitzgerald, 2013)
The two sides of the conflict blamed each other for the attack. Different countries especially the first world countries such as The United Kingdom and the United States believed the attack was the Syrian president Bashar Al Assad forces' responsibility. However, some other countries refused to blame Bashar Al Assad, and Russia was one of those (Drum, 2013).
A report by the United Kingdom’s joint intelligence committee was published on 29th August 2013 claiming that the chemical attacks had been carried out by Bashar Al Assad, in contrast to Russian officials who asserted there was no proof that Bashar Al Assad had a hand in the chemical attacks. Russian foreign minister Serig Lavrov described the reports of the anti-Al Assad nations including the United Kingdom as "unconvincing" (NYT, 2013).
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Syrian chemical attack timeline
The following table (1) summarizes the timeline of the chemical attack for one month from the 21st of August 2013, in the early hours when the reports of the chemical attack first emerged to the 20th of September 2013 (Kimball, 2018).
What is the data
BBC news
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was launched on 1 January 1927. BBC news online was launched in November 1997. It is one of the most popular news websites in the UK. Reaching over a quarter of the UK's internet users, and worldwide. With around 14 million global readers every month (69). The website contains comprehensive international news coverage as well as entertainment, sports science, and political news (70). BBC news online is the website of BBC news the division of the BBC news responsible for news gathering and production. The website is the most popular news website in the United Kingdom, and a significant part of BBC online (BBC.co.uk). The site records around 40 million unique users a week (about 60% to 70% of visitors are from the UK (Guardian, 2007). The website contains news coverage as well as British entertainments, science, and political news. Many reports are accompanied by video and audio from the BBC television and radio services news the site was named best news website at the BAFTA interactive entertainment award every year from the website creation until 2001 when the award was withdrawn. It has won both the Judges award and the people's voice award many times over the years for best news site at the annual Webby awards. The website was launched in November 1997, headed by founding editor Mike Smart and project direction Bob Eggington.
Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC admitted in 2010 in the BBC. I joined 30 years ago in the production trainee, in 1979, there was, in much of current affairs, in terms of peoples' politics, which were quite vocal, a massive bias to the left, the organization did struggle then with impartiality. Former political editor Andrew Marr has argued the liberal bias of the BBC is the product of the types of people. The corporation employs Peter Aborne wrote rather than representing the nation as a whole, the BBC has become a vital resource and sometimes attack weapon for a narrow, arrogant left-liberal elite (Telegragh, 2011). The former director general of the BBC, Greg Dyke, has criticized the BBC as a part of a Westminster conspiracy to maintain the British political system(News, 2009). The BBC Editorial guidelines on politics and public states that while the voices and opinions of opposition parties must be routinely aired and challenged, the government of the day will often be the primary source of news (72).
Russia Today
Russia Today (RT) is a multilingual Russian based television network. It was launched in 2005. RT presents around the clock news bulletins, documentaries, talk shows, and debates as well as sports news RT is one of the channels which aimed at overseas market. The network signal is carried by 22 satellites and over 230 operators, which allow some 644 million people to watch it in more than 100 countries RT America was available to 85 million people in the United States in 2013. RT has become the first TV news channel in history to reach one billion viewers on YouTube. According to the broadcaster's audience research board between 2.2-2.3 million Britons tuned to RT during the second half of 2012, making it the fourth most-watched rolling news channel in Britain behind BBC news, sky news and Aljazeera English(Spy, 2013; STATEMENT, 2013)
The network asserts that RT offers a Russian perspective on global events although it is criticized as being a propaganda outlet for the Russian government (Bidder, 2013; CBSNEWS, 2005). In 2013 president Putin admitted certainly the channel is funded by the government, so it cannot help but reflect the Russian government's official position but stressed we never intended this channel to be apologetic for the Russian political line(KREMLIN, 2013; POST, 2013). The channel's intent was to have a professional format like BBC, CNN and Euro news that would reflect Russia's opinion of the world and present a more balanced picture of Russia (NOVOSIT, 2005). Since it was founded, RT has been accused of being a mouthpiece of the Kremlin. Pascal Bonnamour, the head of the European department of reporters without borders, called the newly announced network another step of the state to control information(Online, 2005). In 2009, Luke Harding the Russian correspondent of the Guardian described Russia Today's advertising campaign in the United Kingdom as an ambitious attempt to create a new post-soviet global propaganda empire(GUARDIAN, 2009). The Economist reported that the core business of RT was anti westernism. The former advisor to Vladimir Putin has labeled the channel as the best Russian propaganda machine targeted at the outside world (TIMES, 2005 ), (Online, 2005). The United States secretary of state John Kerry referred to Russia Today as a state-sponsored propaganda bullhorn, and he continued by saying Russia Today network has been deployed to promote President Putin's fantasy about what is playing out on the ground(LoGiurato, 2014).
News value and criteria to choose the data
Data Collection
The data was collected from two different TV news online websites. The data from these two TV news websites were chosen because of the differences in the policy of Russia and the United Kingdom regarding the Syrian revolution and the chemical attack. This presents a contrastive view and different opinions regarding the reporting and representation of the Syrian revolution and the chemical attack. According to media analysts, Russia Today TV has an ideology of supporting Bashar Al Assad's government, which is in contrast to the BBC news, which supports the Syrian people’s revolution and reports that Bashar Al Assad was responsible for the chemical attack (Guardian) The data was collected from BBC news websites. First, the researcher went to the BBC news website interface and used the BBC news website as a source of data, selecting Middle East News from the "World" section of the site.
When I decided to use the BBC in October 2013, the BBC online news reports on the Syrian chemical attacks were easily accessible using the search terms "Syrian chemical attack." From August 2013 to 21st September 2013, it was possible to search online for all the news related to this attack. Figure (2) below is an example of the results obtained from the search terms “Syrian chemical attack” from the BBC website.
I used the search term “Syrian chemical attack” to obtain all the news that was related to the Syrian chemical attack. An example of the results I got from the search term is shown in picture 4.
Build the corpus
Table 2 shows the number of articles. From the BBC 230 articles were gathered in one month. The mean average number of words per article was 7400, and the mean average number of sentences was 8 per article. For RTV, the number of articles was 171. The mean average words for each article was 7200 per article, and the mean number of sentences on average per article was 13.
I copied each article one by one and saved them in a word file, and then I cut all unrelated information, photos, readers' comments, and advisements. I kept the date and author's name for future reference. I tagged the headlines manually by using XML-style tags, for example:
The research term: Extracting the Key Words in context (KWIC).
A concordance can is a simple list of all the occurrences of a particular search term in a corpus, presented within the context that they occur within, usually, a few words to the left and right of the search term (Baker, 2006). Baker (2006) describes "the concordance as a keyword in context" or "KWIC," which has a different meaning for the concept of keyword “KW.” In other words, KWIC is the word that is currently under examination and can be any word that takes the interest of the researcher (Baker, 2006).
In this research, I will use the technique of investigating the concordance of pre-decided research words. These words have been chosen to answer the research questions. The research questions are indented to find out how the language in (RT and BBC) used to present the chemical attack and its main participants (the two sides of the conflict). Another goal of this research is to find out how the United Kingdom and Russia are presented by each other.
I examined the word list of the two corpus (BBC corpus and RTV corpus) to extract the words that fall under the categories that I built under the research questions. Thus, the investigation of the concordances of these terms will be examined and analyzed using critical stylistic tools. The primary objective of this research is to find out how language was used to present the chemical attack and its participants. It will also be critical to find out about the voice of the Russian government. Also, I will look at how language was used to present these two third parties and the features of language used to show their role and involvement in the chemical attack in Syrian revaluation. To extract the (KWIC), the words and terms that represent the salient themes, the corpus was uploaded in w matrix. Then, I went to the word list and extracted the words and phrases that were used to present, firstly, the chemical attack, which was, "chemical attack, sarin, gas, chemical weapons, redline, poison attack (gas), august attack; Categories the concordance lines.
After I uploaded the data in matrix corpus. Then, I extracted the concordances lines of words (attack/attacks). figure one shows that in BBC 663 concordances lines for attack and 183 occurrences of word attacks figure
Examine the concordances lines of word attack/attacks I found some concordances lines of attack not used to describe the chemical attack I excluded all these lines only to keep the attack which means the chemical attack which is sometimes referred to as (gas, sarin, and chemical attacks, the attack, an attack, attack, 21 August attack, last week attack)
Extract the participant’s concordance lines of the attack
The Syrian people who were ‘Syrian (S), civilian, innocent people, children, refugees, Syria'; Bashar Al-Assad and his government and national allies, which were ‘Syria regime, Syria forces, Alasad, Bashar Alasad, Damascus, Mr-Muallem, Walid Muallem, the Syrian government, and Al-Assad'. I categorized the participants according to the set they belong, along with all their possible substitute and alternative words in table 4 according to their various types. For example, there were different words used to refer to the Syrian president - Al Assad, Bashar Alasad, Alasad, and Syria regime To perform this step, I extracted the word list of my corpus data to ease this step I want to (POS) and retrieved the list with the proper nouns (NP) tag. The figures show the proper noun list on BBC and RT
After I extracted the word list, I examined it manually to obtain the words used to present the two sides of the conflict, the United Kingdom government, and Russia government
The following table shows the research terms, and it’s all alternative and names and terms
Concordance
A concordances corpus tool was used in this research, which involved a list of every instance of a word or phrase in the corpus with an expandable context up to a whole text view. A concordance is essential for CDA, because of its emphasis on going beyond analyzing lexical items, and deals with the propositions, contexts, and the whole texts in which they occur. One of the most useful procedures that the researcher can use to investigate the corpus and answer the research questions is using the concordance lines, which can lead the researcher to carry out a close investigation of data (Baker, 2006, p. 71).
A concordance can be defined as a simple list of all the occurrences of a particular search term in a corpus, presented within the context that they occur within usually, a few words to the left the left and right of the search term (Baker, 2006). Baker (2006) describes “the concordance as keyword in context” or “KWIC,” which has a different meaning for the concept of keyword “KW.” In other words, KWIC is the word that is currently under examination and can be any word that takes the interest of the researcher (Baker, 2006).
One of the issues that I faced during the analysis of the concordance lines of these "KWIC" is the use of the pronouns (it, they, she, he, them, they, its), along with the determiners (this, that, these those), which are used to avoid repetition and are used as referential words, instead of using the actual referent. Baker (2006) found that when the researcher expands the examination to include the concordances of the pronoun and determines, they may add more evidence to the availability patterns of discourse. Baker explains that taking anaphora and cataphora into account is likely to make the process of analysis time consuming, although it is likely to result in interesting findings. Since the research corpus is small, it is manageable to be examined line by line (Baker, 2006, p. 90).
Find the concordances of the research terms
Categories the concordances
In this step, I adopted the same procedure were used by Paul Baker and Tony McEnery (a corpus-based approach to discourses of refugees and asylum seekers). In their research they sorted the concordance lines of the word (refuge, refuges) in alphabetical order using the words directly to the left and right of the search term, then the clauses and the phrases of the target term were grouped into categories of similar themes or topics.
The examination of the concordance lines of the term (chemical attack and all alternative words help in establishing that the reports of the news (BBC and RT) about the Gautha chemical attack in a month presented it in three different topics or themes.
These themes are grouped according to the explicit or sometimes hidden meaning that can be understood from the context of these terms.
The attack responsibility
The reaction about this attack
Describing the attack, damage, causalities, and victims
The following table shows every theme with the terms that presented it
When a pattern has been spotted, the researcher carried out a further examination to determine whether or not the pattern is widespread. However, it should take into consideration that using a concordance to conduct critical discourse analysis is still a matter of interpretation. This is supported by arguing that the patterns of language which are found may be subject to the researcher's ideological stance and how in which they are interpreted may also be filtered through the researcher’s subjective position (Baker, 2006, p. 92).
Comparing the Patterns, quantity and frequency page 8 patterns and meaning in discourse
Patterns
As it clears the using of corpus linguistics considers as a quantitative method. The results of having the language presented in one place by itself cannot provide a clear insight. However, the quantitative results of the text make the researcher conducting word frequency and then spotting the patterns of usages and then analyze the data to answer the research questions.
Comparing the word frequency and patterns between two discourses highlight the typical grammar and recurrent topics of a discourse type of data selected to study Patterns.
As it clears the using of corpus linguistics considers as a quantitative method. The results of having the language presented in one place by itself cannot provide a clear insight. However, the quantitative results of the text make the researcher conducting word frequency and then spotting the patterns of usages and then analyze the data to answer the researches questions.
Comparing the word frequency and patterns between two discourses highlight the typical grammar and recurrent topics of a discourse type of data selected to study patterns.
For example, in this step, I checked manually all the concordance lines that present the term chemical attack, and its alternative words theses are grouped under the topic (who was responsible for the attack).
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