For a postfoundational method to news discourse analysis

Abstract

The construction of news is not haphazard. It is institutional in the sense it is a fundamental part of the content media organizations churn out in accordance with certain standards, styles, rules, and rituals. As such, organizational discourse, whether news or any other genre, according to Fairhurst (2009, p. 1608), would represent “a constellation of perspectives united by the view that language does not mirror reality, but constitutes it”. Thus news discourses organizations employ are a “structured collection of texts embodied in the practices of talking and writing (as well as a wide variety of visual representations and cultural artefacts) that bring organizationally related objects into being as these texts are produced, disseminated and consumed”. Phillips et al. (2004, p. 636) assert that the unravelling of social reality of an organization entails “the systematic study of texts—including their production, dissemination, and consumption—in order to explore the relationship between discourse and social reality.” This paper is an inquiry into the news discourse of a global, multilingual broadcaster with the aim of presenting a method on how to investigate news from a postfoundational discourse analysis perspective (henceforth PDA). Despite its popularity as a discourse analysis tool, PDA still “suffers from a quite considerable methodological deficit”. The paper demonstrates that the deficit PDA suffers from can be overcome with recourse to other approaches, specifically critical realist discourse studies (RDS). The following section presents an outline of the major tenets of PDA and then it shows how its combination with RDS can help remedy some of its shortcomings.

Keywords:

• postfoundational discourse analysis
• critical discourse analysis
• critical realism
• news discourse

1. Theoretical framework

To overcome some of the weaknesses associated with discourse analysis of media texts, particularly in studies pursuing critical discourse analysis (c.f. Breeze, 2011), the past two decades have seen the emergence of a distinct body of work under the umbrella of postfoundational discourse analysis, covering appellations like “the Lacanian Left” (Stavrakakis, 2007) “radical democracy” (Tønder & Thomassen, 2005), “the Essex School” (MacKenzie, 2000)), the “new theories of discourse” (Torfing, 1999), or “post-Marxism” (Miklitsch, 1995). Here I will stick to the most common label known as postfoundational discourse analysis or PDA.

This article’s PDA’s theoretical framework draws on Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and specifically two of their three core constructs: “Nodal point” and “Affect”. The third construct “lack” is left out mostly due to constraints of space rather than irrelevance.

Laclau and Mouffe’s nodal points (1985, p. 112) are the elements which hold discourses together. They are also called “empty signifiers” (Laclau, 1996) and “master signifiers” (Žižek, 1998). This paper will employ Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) original term, “nodal points.” Lacan (1993) discusses the meaning, role, and impact of certain central discursive terms with the ability of holding different themes and discourses within a text together. For Lacan, these terms’ role in discourse is akin to that played by an “upholstery button” that helps shapeless fabric stay in place. Hence, Laclau and Mouffe’s original term de caption has also been translated into “anchoring point” and “quilting point.” They also elaborate on the term “floating signifiers”, which along with their nodal points have no agreed-upon meaning, with their referents having different association in different contexts. Claude Lévi-Strauss, who coined the term, says floating signifiers, while they can bring discourses together and render nodal points coherent, are in themselves “void of meaning” and “represent an undetermined quantity of signification,” (cited in Abéles, 200, p. 34). It takes analysts hard time to attach context to floating signifiers because they “mean different things to different people: they may stand for many or even any signifieds; they may mean whatever their interpreters want them to mean” (Chandler, 2007, p. 74).

Nodal points are also signifiers. However, on their own and outside their non-discursive context, they are empty, with no meaning or impact, according to Laclau and Mouffe. Once these central discursive terms are inserted in the text, they generate their own floating signifiers. Together, they become part of the text’s non-discursive world, with the power to bring its disparate and puzzling discourses together. Though occasionally described as empty, these signifiers have the capacity to breathe life into discourse in a retroactive manner (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985).

When left to their destiny, nodal points as signifiers do not carry any particular content and they do not necessarily conform to the things they name, as the function of “naming is a primal baptism, not grounded on any universal rule” (Laclau, 2006, p. 109). The naming of gold is the classic example Kripke (1980) and Žižek (1989) use to apply Laclau’s conceptual framework of nodal points. They argue that the name “gold” establishes the identity of the material we refer to as gold even if all the qualities we generally associate to something “gold” were not there. However, one of the most important aspects of nodal points is their retroactive or historical function as “the effect of meaning is always produced backwards” (Žižek, 1998, p. 113).

But despite their ability to hold the ambiguous and divergent parts a discourse together and working as a tool to describe its shape, nodal points in themselves do not reveal what drives a discourse to be effective and sustainable. To investigate this important facet, Laclau (1996) introduces another aspect to discourse, which turns attention to its “affective dimension”. The literature defining Lacula’s PDA empirically shows that nodal points with emotional underpinnings can be particularly effective (e.g., Fineman, 2000; Hardy & Phillips, 1998; Knights & McCabe, 1998). A post-foundational approach to discourse would investigate how far nodal points are underpinned by affective forces and the role of emotions in determining their effectiveness.

With PDA’s second aspect, “affect”, Laclau (2005, p. 111) sheds light on notions which he calls “discursive or hegemonic formations.” These formations “articulate differential and equivalential logics” and would be difficult to comprehend “without the affective component”. Tackling the aspect of “affect,” according to Laclau, discourse analysts should first be able to explain why people or organizations drift towards some particular nodal points rather than others. Second, “affect” will explain how people and organizations succeed in sustaining certain discourses and persist in using them over a long period of time.

There are imagined scenarios, Lacan (1998) says, which we construct around what he calls “objet petit a” or an object that causes desire. This happens through the discursive articulation of fantasies; with whose support our desires are objectified. Lacan’s “object petit” is a central concept in Laclau’s (1996) PDA in which he attempts to demonstrate how our hidden desires drag us towards certain discursive terms rather than others. Laclau associates desires and fantasies with “affect” because they reinforce the impact of the discursive terms reflecting them. Elaborating further on Lacan’s notion of fantasy of discourse, Roberts (2005) and Žižek (1998, p. 190) note that our desires sometimes can have concrete forms and be shared widely in the society.

Elaborating further on the role of PDA’s second aspect, “affect,” Žižek (2003, 146) says it can function like a commodity. When promoted or advertised, a commodity functions like “a mysterious entity full of theological caprices, a particular object satisfying a particular need.” Though “a mysterious entity,” a floating signifier has “the promise of something more, an unfathomable” impact that only its retroactive, historical as well as current contexts, can reveal. The promotion of discourse with political, religious and cultural orientations “is supported by a reference to a lost state of harmony, unity and fullness, a reference to a pre-symbolic Real which most political projects aspire to bring back,” notes Stavrakakis (1999, p. 52).

Concepts like desire and fantasy in PDA can be a good tool for discourse analysts to highlight discursive features promoting political orientations and promises. In that sense, we can explain a news organization’s nostalgic discursive fantasies of the past and its desire to unearth them, breathe life into them and transmute them into its news and current affairs discourse. The discursive process is part of attempts to alleviate feelings of anxiety or insecurity and how a news outlet may desire or aspire to revive discursive scenarios and narratives once prevalent in the past (Ybema, 2004).

In this sense, there are methodological affinities between PDA and RDS as both investigate how certain discursive patterns hold together (nodal points) and their impact along discursive and non-discursive lines. However, RDS analysts are more concerned with how signifiers impact the “underlying generative structures” of texts. Studies drawing on RDS aim to find some relationship between discursive and non-discursive elements to interpret social life. These lean on critical realism and are best represented in the writings of Collier (1994), Bhaskar (1998), and Danermark et al. (2005). RDS claims that discursive aspects of texts and their non-discursive aspects, though separated, are intertwined. These critical discourse analysts interpret social life by unfolding the links between discursive aspects of texts mainly language, signs, symbols, themes, styles, on the one hand, and non-discursive aspects, which exist independent of discursive aspects like social structures of politics, capitalism, culture, power, artefacts environment, etc. (Fleetwood, 2005).

RDS is the most relevant to tackle PDA’s methodological deficit through its assertion of the existences of “generative mechanisms” underpinning relations between discursive and non-discursive aspects of discourse. As such, the discursive aspects of texts are endowed with generative and ontological characteristics with the potential of representing the non-discursive world. This underlying structure has the capacity of drawing generative mechanisms between the discursive and non-discursive aspects of discourse. A realist critical analysis of the discursive versus non-discursive should produce rules of a generative nature which can help shed light not only on social actors involved in discourse but also on the organizations reproducing it (Danermark et al., 2005).

2. Method

Al Jazeera Arabic (henceforth AJA) is the case for analysis and the source for the data in this study. AJA is by far the most prominent, most popular, and most influential all news Arabic channel. It is a force to reckon with and has been at the forefront of rows, whether political and military, in the Middle East (Miles, 2006). Established in 1996, it has rattled governments and “redefined modern journalism” in the Middle East and beyond, claim El-Nawawy and Iskander (2002). In the aftermath of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the then U.S. President George W. Bush was reported to have made “clear he wanted to bomb Al Jazeera” headquarters in Qatar and elsewhere (Cowell, 2005). AJA sat uneasily at the heart of the 2017 crisis in the Persian Gulf when a coalition of Arab states led by Saudi Arabia imposed political and economic sanctions on Qatar. One of the conditions for alleviating or lifting the blockade was for Qatar to close down the channel (Carlstrom, 2017).

The paper employs some of the basic lines of PDA and RDS to investigate two moments of AJA’s news coverage of the war in Syria. The study attempts to tackle the “methodological deficit” PDA suffers (Marttila, 2015, p. 4) by merging its tenets with other approaches like RDS as outlined in the introduction.

To identify AJA’s news items that mostly discussed the war in Syria, the author searched for “Syria news” within the broadcaster’s online digital archives available at http://www.aljazeera.net/portal. The search also focused on moments before and after a Saudi-led coalition of Arab states imposed economic sanctions on Qatar. Articles merely belonging to other genres like features, columns, and opinion, were not included in the data. Only news stories covering events taking place in Syria were included. Overall, 20 news stories were selected,10 belonging to pre-Qatar blockade, and 10 to post-Qatar blockade.

The paper’s data comprises hard news texts. Text-based analyses basically deal with how organizations and their actors employ texts and for what purposes (e.g., Cooren, 2000; Iedema, 2007). Texts even at the level of utterances, according to Michael Bakhteen (Holquist, 2003), are dialogical by nature but they become impregnated with meaningful, emotional effect and even power once they are transmuted by powerful organizations and then mobilized and circulated widely.

The research triangulates the analysis of the data with semi-structured interviews.¹ The interviews were conducted in the period following the Qatar blockade of June 2017 with six high-profile respondents, four from AJA and two from local Qatari Arabic newspapers. The interviewees anonymity is preserved by assigning pseudonyms to the six respondents as follows: (1) Consultant, (2) Quality Head, (3) Editor-in-Chief, (4) Newspaper Editor, (5) Principal Presenter, (6) Newspaper Managing Editor.

3. Analysis

In the following, I will give a somewhat detailed post-foundational discourse analysis of AJA’s coverage of the war in Syria taking two moments of time into consideration: the moment before the Qatar blockade and the moment after the imposition of the blockade. The aim is to offer a method on how to do PDA in combination with RDS.

3.1. Syria coverage during period of pre-Qatar blockade

Let us first start by analyzing a few samples of AJA’s coverage of Syria in the years before the June 2017 blockade of Qatar by a Saudi-led coalition. For nearly a decade, Syria has been in the throes of a ferocious and ruinous civil war. “The full-scale civil war,” according to the BBC (2017), “has left more than 300,000 people dead” and ruined the country. It has led to millions escaping their homes to find somewhere safer to live or fleeing their homeland.

The analysis below produces two major nodal points, or central discursive terms. These terms overdetermine other discursive elements, or floating signifiers. Although hard to define, floating signifiers will have no content in the absence of the central discursive term to which they are tied (Laclau, 1996).

3.1.1. 1. “Activist or activism”

A cursory discursive analysis of the pre-blockade data shows that AJA transmutes and reproduces the language of the disparate Syrian opposition groups and organizations as if it were the final news output. In other words, AJA treats the raw content it receives from these groups as if it had gone through editing, vetting and gatekeeping processes. A closer discursive investigation reveals that the broadcaster relies heavily on “activists” for content, which is mostly unauthenticated and almost impossible to verify. Let us examine a few excerpts from a piece of hard news headlined “173 killed and unabated bombing in Syria,” published on 18 August 2012:

Activists broadcast more pictures that show the size of destruction which the city of Deir al-Zour in eastern Syria has suffered.

The activists said the regime’s army continued its shelling … and that the bombing was carried out by Mig aircraft, the thing which caused deaths and injuries and led to the destruction and burning of houses. Deaths occurred in a similar bombing campaign at Maarba in Daraa.

Activists reported that clashes erupted following an attack by the Syrian Free Army on the positions of the regime’s army on Daraa Highway in which tanks belonging to the regime army’s forces were destroyed.

AJA leans heavily on one side of the event in the story, attributing most content to “activists” as a generic term to represent opposition and rebel groups fighting the government in Syria. AJA does not identify these “activists” nor qualify or caveat the content it receives from them. There is no indication of their status as providers of content or gatherers of news. Nonetheless, they are a major source of news content, most of which paraphrased. “Activism” from which the term “activist” is derived is one of the most recurrent or central concepts in AJA’s pre-Qatar blockade news discourse. It is important to note that the nodal points, and the signifiers floating around we identify in this analysis (see below), deal with objects which are intangible, indescribable or undefinable as they give different meanings with different impact for different people and in different situations. “Activism” or “Activists” for AJA are not simply the representation of what we see in them. There is much more to them in the real world. They are only tangible, describable, and definable within the social and discursive context of their users (Stavrakakis, 2000), in this case AJA.

Note how Consultant sees AJA’s “activism” or “activist” journalism²:

Al Jazeera (AJA) relied excessively on activists … We treated their content as if they were professional journalists. In Syria, we went too far in our reliance on activists. We supplied them with advanced digital gadgets like cameras and smart phones and our activists became our reporters.”

AJA’s Quality Head says:

We used activists in Syria like journalists. We put them on the air … We created ‘populist journalism’. Activists have a cause. Al Jazeera found itself on the same side of the fence because the political circles (the royalty in Qatar) were anti-regime in Syria.

Noe and Raad (2012) in an investigative piece say that AJA relies heavily on Syrian rebel “activists”, whom the channel supplies with high-tech smart phones to feed it with content.

The faith in “activism” or “activists” as a nodal point for AJA spawns an abundance of generic discursive terminology in its Syria news discourse, which play the role of floating signifiers. Terms like “deaths, injuries, houses, clashes, tanks, villages, demonstrations, desertions, pictures, and officers” are used generically in the sample below, the thing that makes it hard if not impossible even to guess the exact number of deaths, tanks, injuries, desertions, officers and the size of demonstrations. These terms function as the discursive offshoot of the major nodal point “activist” or “activism.” Though linguistically and ontologically unrelated, they permeate the discourse when the nodal point of news coverage is “activism” or “activists.” A professional journalist would have tried to verify, quantify and authenticate all those generic terms as well as their nodal point. Note the following:

… bombing was carried out by Mig aircraft, the thing which caused deaths and injuries and led to the destruction and burning of houses. Deaths occurred in a similar bombing campaign at Maarba in Daraa.

AJA airs the “amateur” pictures and videos provided by “activists” with no reference to their authentication or provenance, say the respondents. They add that this has been the case with Syria-related data specifically belonging to the period prior to Qatar sanctions. “Activists”, who are the most prominent sources for AJA’s Syria news, and cited 13 times in this particular story, are not professional reporters and the information they provide should be part of user-generated content (UGC). Issues about UGC’s provenance, authentication and representation through warnings on-air, or in writing, that the content received cannot be independently confirmed, are crucial not only for impartiality and objectivity, but for transparency, inquiry and open debate (Arendt, 1958; Habermas, 1973).

The nodal point “activist or activism” and its floating signifiers in AJA’s news discourse have no identifiable referents due to their generic nature. In other words, they are not reified and there is no agreement between AJA and the “activists” (providers and producers of content) about their meaning. Claude Lévi-Strauss says floating signifiers in themselves are “void of meaning’ and ‘represent an undetermined quantity of signification,” (cited in Abéles, 200, p. 34). The disparate bits of information AJA receives from “activists” brings the pieces of its disparate news discourse together despite the invariability, ambiguity and almost non-existence of what they signify. Thus, it is hard to attach content to them because they “mean different things to different people: they may stand for many or even any signifieds; they may mean whatever their interpreters want them to mean” (Chandler, 2007, p. 74).

3.1.2. 2. “Shiite or Shi’ism”

The analysis of pre-blockade news discourse shows that AJA plays on the sectarian divisions in Arab and Muslim world. Its backing of groups opposing the Syrian government in Damascus has religious and historical roots, emanating from centuries-old religious and sectarian schisms between the two main branches of Islam—the Shiites and the Sunnis. Syrian rebel groups are Sunni and the Sunni State of Qatar has been a major source of their weapons and money (Mazzetti et al., 2013). The Shiites, a form of which is represented by the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his minority Alawite sect in Syria, are mostly allied to Iran.

Says Editor-in-Chief:

We had reporters (who) employed proverbs and verses from Hadeeth (sayings of the prophet) and the holy Koran to disparage (Syrian President) Bashar al-Assad. There has been so much reliance on heritage, religion, sectarianism and history in interpreting present events. These are mannerisms. They are destructive to journalism.

In the pre-blockade period, “Al Jazeera’s coverage pursued an anti-Syrian regime coverage to a large degree,” adds Quality Head. Principal Presenter goes on: “Sometimes we exaggerated; sometimes you feel that it is a kind of propaganda or incitement.”

There is discursive evidence, particularly in readers’ comments (see below) of how AJA narratives occasionally echoes the discourses of the “Islamic State” or ISIS. There are comments which brand the ‘Shiites “Rawafidh” or rejectionists, a pejorative historical term and which for the mainstream Sunni Muslims means those who have rejected the true Islamic faith. The “Islamic State” and al-Qaeda unearthed the label (Jones, 2017).

Sectarian rhetoric is not hard to detect in AJA’s pre-blockade Syria news coverage, particularly in language that highlights certain historical religious idioms favorable of one side of the conflict and pejorative of the other. A good example is the use of the central discursive term or nodal point “Shiite,” which AJA often attaches to titles of groups and affiliations of personalities opposing groups belonging to mainstream Sunni Islam, the creed of Qatar royalty. The word “Shiite” as the nodal point brings its various floating signifiers together, all of them derogatory of this branch of Islam. Some of these discursive elements or floating signifiers like “Nusayri”, “Rawafidh”, “Majus”, “Safawi”, “Hizb al-Lat”, and “Hizb al-Shaytan”, only appear interactively, while “Shiite’ and its discursive offshoot “Alawite” are part of the broadcaster’s news discourse.

Some explaining of history is necessary to put these floating signifiers into context. The first discursive element, “Nusayri,” is a Shiite-specific derogatory appellation in reference to the 8^th century Abu Shuayb Muhammad Ibn Nusayr, founder of the “Alawite” Shiite sect. It frames the second term “Alawite”, a branch of “Shi’ism” to whom the Syrian President Bashar Al Assad belongs as worshiping a “man” and not Allah (God) and equates them to “infidels” who have either to convert to Sunni Islam or be exterminated. The third is “Rawafidh,” or rejectionists, because in the mainstream Sunni Muslim eyes the Shiites reject the true path of Islam. The fourth is “Majus,” in reference to Persian Shiites who are in conflict with God. The fifth is “Safawi,” in reference to the Persian Safavid dynasty (1501–1736), which introduced Shiisim in Iran.

It is worth noting that AJA’s vitriol, with historical and religious roots, is not confined to “Alawites” of Syria or “Shiites” of Iran. It extends to the Shiite Hezbollah Party in Lebanon, calling it ‘Hizb al-Lat (the Party of Lat), in referent to a pre-Islamic Arabian goddess, meaning that the bearer of the term is an apostate and polytheist who must be smashed, and “Hizb al-Shaytan” (the Party of Satan), with “Shaytan” a Koranic term meaning a base, impure and nefarious soul.

The above discursive elements function as floating signifiers with historical and religious roots tied to the central nodal point “Shiite or Shi’ism”. Their content vacillates in light of historical events and social, political or cultural interactions. They bear a differential rather than an equivalential meaning or logic, with the nodal point “Shiites” and its subordinating signifiers reinforcing hegemony and control and legitimizing resistance on the part of the providers, producers and disseminators of news discourse, i.e. AJA. Drawing on history and religion, AJA holds its news discourse together through these signifiers despite their zero logic, since they mean different things in different historical contexts to different people (Laclau, 2005).

In divisive times and events, like the war in Syria, there is a tendency by the sides to lean on history or religion-based discursive terms to advance their cause. But instead of shedding light on the situation to bring the parties together, they make conditions murkier and add fuel to fire. Once one side of the conflict adopts them, the other side digs up their own opposite discursive counterparts (Bernstein, 2005). Pro-Assad government Muslim Shiite groups have extracted their own discursive terms that are pejorative of Muslim Sunnis from their own history books. Signifiers like “Nawasib”, “Wahabbis, ‘Amawi,’ or ‘Takfiri,’ (their explanation is not given here due to restrictions on space) are recurrent in Shiite groups” narrative. Pejorative of Muslim Sunnis, they have no place in AJA’s news discourse or readers’ comments (Zelin, 2014).

Note the following citations from the data, most of which are headlines of news stories published during the pre-blockade period:

Shiite militias kill scores

Testimonies about Shiite militia violations

The Iraqi Shiite Al Nujabaa movement

Murtada al-Sindi, who is a leader in the opposition al-Wafaa Shiite party in Bahrain

Shiite Popular Mobilization militia

Self-defense force to protect Alawites in Lattakia

Alawite military personnel captured by opposition

The Alawite sect and Assad’s rule

The Alawite state is Assad’s last resort

Syrian women Alawites brandish weapons in the face of the regime

Jones (2017), who has studied “automated sectarianism” in Twitter fueled by the Gulf states, says that the resort to religious terminology that is pejorative “conflates acts of violence, terrorism and unrest … This strongly suggests that institutions, people or agencies with significant resources are deliberately creating divisive, anti-Shia sectarian propaganda.”

What light can a post-foundational discourse analysis shed on why and how AJA adopts a sectarian tone in its news discourse and commentary as part of a strategy of dehumanizing the other side in its pre-blockade coverage of the war in Syria?

One significant feature of nodal points, according to Laclau and Mouffe (1985), is their capacity to influence other discursive elements despite their loss of content due to lapse of time and history. The nodal point “Shiite or Shi’ism” has gained currency due to conflicting discourses that have followed the war in Syria since its inception in 2011. The central discursive term “Shiite or Shi’ism” has consequently breathed new life into additional signifiers which were dormant but suddenly resurface as part of the nodal point to which they are tied. Its six floating signifiers, pejorative of the Muslim Shiites, had lost content for centuries, but assume “affect” and power when an organization transmutes them into news discourse.

To explain this further, let us consider once again the term “Rawfidh”. Until before the war in Syria, this floating signifier would have had no relevant content to the region’s sectarian social reality with its meaning dormant or rather confined to history books. The dissemination and reach of a floating signifier with retroactive meaning leads to obsession and unrestricted diffusion that makes it difficult to pin down (Alvesson, 1993). Important in this regard is not only to note how terms like “Rawfidh” gain content, but how they resurrect the retroactive meaning and how a news broadcaster like AJA deploys them to exhibit its own bias. Also, it is essential to note how the broadcaster wavers between different contexts to attach different contents to the nodal points and their discursive offshoots it employs. From an obscure “floating signifier” that Muslims had resigned to the books of history, “Rawafidh” becomes an active and vibrant signifier AJAs use to advance their agenda.

4. Interactivity and floating signifiers

This section demonstrates how the nodal points and their floating signifiers identified so far play out in AJA’s interactive discourse. Interactivity is today a major characteristic of human communication and it assumes additional significance in the media (McQuail, 2005). In the world of news and current affairs, it mainly relates to users’ comments. Major media today give their readers the opportunity to express their views vis-à-vis the theme(s) their content presents. An investigation of the users’ responses and initiatives can tell a great deal not only about viewership, but also about the orientation and inclination of floating signifiers and how they impact the flow of AJA’s news discourse (Nielsen, 2014; Santana, 2011).

The deployment of nodal points and their floating signifiers in AJA’s news discourse spurs a stream of comments particularly in stories in which the central discursive terms “Shiite or Sh’ism” and the floating signifier “Rawafidh” is mentioned. The two discursive terms, like a promoted product, arouse sentiments and emotions on readers that there is more to that lurks behind them (Böhm & Batta, 2010). Laclau (2005) urges post-foundational analysts to dig deeper into emotions and desires hiding behind floating signifiers and what they can lead to. He refers to this aspect of discourse as “objet petit a”, in which a discursive term, like a promoted product, is the focal point for emotional and passionate relationship with what it represents or in Laclaun terms hides in the real world. For Stavrakakis (2007), the process through which a discourse organizes itself around “object petit a” is a kind of shared or collective passionate experience.

Despite the emotions and desires driving the comments, they seem to have been published with little or no moderation. The comments on news stories selected for analysis manifest distinctive discursive patterns aligned mainly with the discursive strategies AJA pursues in terms of its emphasis on religion, sectarianism, and political convictions. The analysis of AJA’s interactive discourse produces five major discursive threads with their distinctive discursive elements or terms:

Firstly, there is excessive reliance on religion-based floating signifiers to justify not only actions and abuses, but also “distortive” discourses (Bernstein, 2005). Note the following recurrent terms:

God grants victory to those He loves; creed; the messenger of the Almighty; Nasara; We beseech God Almighty; the Sunnis and the assemblage of Muslims; blasphemy; hypocrisy; grain of faith; Satan’s; Jesus; Shiite, Shaytan, Rawafidh, Nusayri … etc.

Secondly, AJA’s floating signifiers are binary in approach. Note how the samples below demonstrate the binary division of “good” versus “evil”. There is evidence that AJA, particularly in the interactive discourse it allowed on its pages in the pre-blockade coverage of Syria, hides behind the discursive and social infallibility of the religious, sectarian and cultural values and convictions their sponsors and financiers propagate (Schlesinger, 2004). The binary discursive categorization of the Syrian conflict intensifies at the level of interactivity. The comments show that the war in Syria pits the “good” (the majority Muslim Sunnis and Sunni rebels) against the “evil” (the minority Shiites and the affiliate Syrian Alawite). Note the following binary opposites in which the interactive discourse clearly identifies who is “good” and who is “bad”:

We are at the threshold in which the nation is being divided into two groups, having no third counterpart. On the one hand, there is the group of hypocrisy with no grain of faith … On the other, there is the group of faith with no grain of hypocrisy.

The final alignment has started. It is either black like the first group, or white like the second group. No grey area from now on … And God grants victory to those He loves.

Thirdly, AJA and its interactive contributors draw on what they see as historical “fact”, employing nodal points and their floating signifiers to justify retaliations and reprisals on the part of one side of the conflict. Note the following samples:

The Baath regime of Assad … has butchered the people and destroyed the land in barbaric ways that surpassed the barbaric ways committed by the Zionists, Nazis and Serbians.

I see that the hand of Shiite Iran is behind such barbaric killing and oppression.

These are the mercenaries of the Safavid party (reference to the ancient Shiite Safavid Empire of Iran)

Fourthly, the interactivity re-words the “lexicon” of the Syrian government through a process critical linguists call “re-lexicalization” (Smith & Higgins, 2013). The channel employs “re-lexicalization” as a rhetorical device to re-word Syrian government discourse, using or coining new lexical items with ideological and “manipulative” connotations. According to Fowler et al. (1979, p. 129), one of the major aims of “lexicalization is to disparage and depersonalize its targets, since the rewording mostly comes with ideological and ‘manipulative’ connotations.” AJA re-words or lexicalizes Syrian president and his government: President Assad of Syria becomes “Syria regime’s president”, Assad becomes “destroyer”, Syrian Army becomes “regime forces”, government troops become “regime troops”. Even the terms “Alawite” or “Shiites” are further degraded to “Satan” or “criminal”, etc. The words “Alawites” and “Shiites” are frequently mentioned but mostly in a derogatory manner.

Fifthly, AJA also leans on “over-lexicalization”, another rhetorical device evident in the news and interactive discourse. In “over-lexicalization”, several words or lexical items are used to represent one single nomenclature or concept. Fairclough (2001, p. 115) calls the process “over-wording.” In a critical analysis of discourse, it is important to examine this device since it “points to areas of intense preoccupation in the experience of values and the group which generates it, allowing the analyst to identify particularities in the ideology of the group” (Fowler et al., 1979, 211). In many situations, says Fairclough (2001, 154), “over-wording shows some preoccupation with some aspect of reality—which may indicate that it is a focus of ideological struggle.” Note how AJA over-words the Syrian government through a variety of floating signifiers:

Does the Alawite creed include anything that prevents them (the Alawites) from mutilating bodies?

These are the mercenaries of the Safavid party of Nassrallah.

the guards of the Satan’s revolution

It is worthwhile to mention that AJA issues no warnings to users before posting a comment apart from saying that the broadcaster does not bear any liability or responsibility for loading interactive content on its website. There are no warnings against defamation. There are no instructions on how to protect individuals or organizations from attacks on their reputation and whether such attacks may result in prosecution.

Asked to explain AJA’s approach to interactivity and readers’ comments, Quality Head said:

Al Jazeera anchored itself in social media. It almost drowned in it … The mantra was ‘open all doors.’ Personally, I gave up writing articles myself due to lack of moderation of comments posted on Al Jazeera website. I forced myself to withdraw, after seeing that Islamists have kidnapped the sphere of interactivity.

5. Syria coverage during post-Qatar blockade period

The analysis of AJA’s news discourse in the period before the Qatar blockade shows how in many situations floating signifiers like “Nusayri”, “Rawafidh”, “Majus”, “Safawi”, “Hizb al-Lat”, and “Hizb al-Shaytan”, or “Alawite”, assume the role of “Shiite or Shi’ism” as a nodal point. It also illustrates how retroactive and historical knowledge plays a central role for AJA and its self-image in pre-blockade Syria coverage.

In addition, the nodal point with the floating signifiers tied to it become important for the AJA’s news discourse as they mirror its core discursive identity in relation to the moment of time of coverage of an event. The retroactive process of digging the past is for the sole purpose of picking up discursive terms that will go with the broadcaster’s agenda of representing the nodal points “Shiites or Shi’ism” in a derogatory manner. In this, Al Jazeera obliterates the notion of the contingent nature of the nodal point and renders it an integral part of its language. With such operation, discursive terms expressing the nodal point “Shiites or Shi’ism” are used to represent actors who do not fall in line with the political orientations of AJA sponsors, the royals of the state of Qatar. This discursive process attaches pejorative connotations to “Shiites or Shi’ism” among the majority Sunni Muslim, whose groups make the backbone of insurgents fighting the government in Syria. But it is important to note that AJA confines this discursive strategy to the pre-Qatar blockade moment. With the advent of the post-blockade Qatar moment, a new discursive strategy dawns, with a new set of nodal points and floating signifiers.

The post-blockade moment ushers in a sudden shift in AJA’s nodal points and their floating signifiers. For instance, AJA abandons the two major nodal points of “activist or activism” and “Shiite or Shi’ism” along with their floating signifiers. The pre-blockade discursive strategy of re- or over-lexicalizing the Syrian government disappears, opting for language that sees both sides of the conflict on almost equal discursive and social footing. The nodal points and their floating signifiers that brought the news discourse together in the pre-blockade period are no more. Also receding and almost disappearing from the post-blockade narrative are recurrent discursive patterns giving a sectarian dimension to the conflict. For example, “Syrian ruler” or “President of the regime” become “Syrian President Bashar al-Assad”. The option of new discursive terminology extends to other branches of the Syrian government and army. For instance, the nodal points and their floating signifiers that characterized the pre-blockade news coverage disappear in post-Qatar blockade period. The discursive process through which neologisms were coined to over- or re-lexicalize the government in Syria and the groups supporting it is replaced by Syrian government nomenclatures. For instance, “Alawite military personnel”, “Alawite sect”, “regime’s forces”, “regime’s air forces”, the “regime’s media”, the “regime’s news agency”—all part of AJA’s pre-blockade floating signifiers—become “Syrian army”, Syrian air force’, “Syrian media”, “the Syrian News Agency”.

Asked for an explanation of the sudden shift in AJA’s coverage, Newspaper Managing Editor said: “Al Jazeera has a special editorial line … and is an independent entity … but now that Gulf countries have committed an aggression … the channel has the right to respond.”

Newspaper Editor says:

As far as the Qatari media are concerned, they adopted a position of flattery … However, following 5 June 2107 – the day in which the crisis (blockade) started – Qatar shed the yoke of flattery and began calling a spade a spade.

Thus, a new discursive reality emerges in this period, with AJA replacing “malignant” discursive terms or signifiers prevalent in pre-Qatar blockade period with “benign” characterizations. For instance, armed groups fighting on the side of the Syrian government are referred to by what they call themselves. They are no longer over-lexicalized by adding the label ‘Shiite, or “Alawite”. The division of the actors on sectarian lines and binary opposites of good/evil dissipates in post-blockade period and is replaced by good/good. Hezbollah and its leader Hassan Nasrallah are no longer disparaged or presented within a pejorative sectarian framing. So are Iraq-based Shiite armed groups, some of which have crossed the border to defend Syria’s President and his government. For instance, Nasrallah and his Hezbollah are stripped of all their malignant discursive representations like “Hizb al-Lat”, or “Hizb al-Shaytan”. Iraqi Shiite armed groups fighting in Syria, discursively represented in a negative manner in pre-Qatar blockade period, are treated discursively “fairly” by AJA in its post-blockade news discourse. A good example is a story AJA issued on 18 August 2017, that is less than two months after the blockade. The story shows an obvious shift in AJA’s discursive strategy in categorizing the Shiite-dominated, pro-Iran paramilitary forces in Syria as it starts employing their appellations without any form of re- or over-lexicalization.

Asked to shed light on the pre-blockade coverage of Syria and the discursive shift in its aftermath, Principal Presenter said AJA was not “as fair as talking about other victims,” particularly “the victims of Islamist groups in Syria … We are not talking too much about that. Sometimes, we don’t talk at all. In my point of view, it is not good, it is not correct.”

In a move that might have surprised many viewers, AJA interrupted its programs to broadcast live a speech by the Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah on 11 November 2017, and the channel’s website published major highlights of the address (Aljazeera, 2017b). “Following seven years of boycott, Al Jazeera gathers courage, interrupts its programs and airs live a speech by Nasrallah,” declared Arabic columnist Adel Al-Aufi (2017). Another move that in fact stunned Arab audiences and their media was AJA’s decision to carry live an address by the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad following a boycott of nearly seven years (Raialyoum 2017).

6. Discursive and social implications

In this section, I will discuss the “affect” (Lacan, 1998) or impact the inclusion or exclusion of certain nodal points might have on news discourse. The analysis here shows how nodal points and the floating signifiers bringing them together generate affective and emotional attachment at two different moments of time. It combines the PDA analytical tools with RDS to arrive at some underlying generative social, discursive or cultural structures to explain organizational reality. The structures generated here do not merely focus on the presence of signifiers around which discourses are structured, but also on the impact or “affect” their absences or their lack might generate (Contu & Willmott, 2005). The lack of discourses for RDS is as important as their presence since both contribute to the reproduction of dominant social or cultural influences (Collier, 1994). The investigation of the underlying generative structures between the discursive and non-discursive aspects of discourse will only have the potential of drawing appropriate generative mechanism between both aspects when presence and lack of signifiers is considered. The critical analysis of the lack or presence of the discursive versus non-discursive can generate rules with the ability to explain the social reality of actors as well as of organizations involved in their reproduction. The explaining is reinforced when the underlying generative structures are applied at two different discursive and social moments of time (Danermark et al., 2005).

PDS as a method can help us understand media texts by relating their linguistic characteristics, among others, to their social assumptions in a logical way and at two different moments of time (Gensler, 1950). Relating AJA’s discursive moments to the social moments in an intersubjective manner will produce some illogical situations lacking wisdom and rationality and having little to do with impartiality. As an illustration, I will formulate two underlying generative structures with their own social assumptions (A and B):

Al. Actors in a news story must receive objective and impartial coverage

A2. Syrian rebels are the main actors in the Syria conflict

A3. Therefore, Syrian rebels must be treated objectively and impartially in coverage

B1. Actors in a news story must receive objective and impartial coverage

B2. The Syrian government is the main actor in the Syria conflict

B3. Therefore, the Syrian government must be treated objectively and impartially in coverage

The social or cultural assumptions in the underlying generative structures in “A” and “B” are supposed to be logical (fair or impartial). But for AJA, only the three statements in “A” are fair and logical in pre-blockade period. The three statements in the underlying generative rule in “B” AJA views as illogical, unfair, and partial in the same period. Here, “A” and “B” are socially and discursively in a differential relationship. Hence the presence of nodal points and floating signifiers contributes to the reproduction of two differential logics or meanings at two different moments about the same event.

In the post-blockade period, the same underlying generative rules in “A” and “B” reproduce equivalential social and discursive assumptions. This is exactly how AJA reproduces its social and discursive world in terms of the news coverage of the war in Syria during the post-Qatar blockade moment, in which it treats the sides to the conflict socially and discursively on almost the same footing. This moment runs socially and discursively contrary to the differential reproduction of news content in the pre-blockade period, in which AJA relies heavily on the presence of certain nodal points along with their floating signifiers to reproduce differential logic.

7. Conclusion

In this paper I have tried to develop a method to news discourse analysis with a post-foundational perspective. The analytical part and the subsequent discussions show that the method is viable if linked to other approaches, particularly critical realist discourse analysis. The paper argues that the suggested method can help us understand media texts by relating their linguistic characteristics, among others, to their social assumptions in a logical way and at two different moments of time. The method helps reveal how far nodal points and their floating signifiers are underpinned by affective forces and the role of emotions in determining their effectiveness. It provides a path to explain why people or organizations drift towards some particular nodal points rather than others. It sheds light on how and why people and organizations succeed in sustaining certain nodal points and persist on using them over a moment of time and then shift their discursive preferences at another moment of time. Taking two moments of time into account, the method helps reveal two different social realities and underlying generative structures for the reproduction of news discourse by an international broadcaster. Focusing on two major nodal points with their floating signifiers, the analysis reveals the binary division of good versus evil of Syria war coverage by AJA. Expanded to interactivity, the method provides a wider picture of the social reality. In the case of AJA, it illustrates how the broadcaster, particularly in the interactive discourse, hides behind the discursive and social infallibility of the religious, sectarian and cultural values and convictions their sponsors and financiers propagate through the presence or absence of certain nodal points.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author received no direct funding for this research.

Notes on contributors

Leon Barkho

Leon Barkho is professor of media and communication sciences at University of Sharjah's College of Communication and professor emeritus at Sweden's Jönköping University. He holds an M.Sc. in applied linguistics and a Ph.D. in media and communication science. Previously, he held positions at Reuters News Agency as bureau chief and the Associated Press as staff writer. He is the founder and editor of the Journal of Applied Journalism and Media Studies. He has written numerous papers on discourse analysis, language, impartiality, translation and media and communication studies. Barkho is the author of “News from the BBC, CNN and Aljazeera” and editor of “From Theory to Practice: How to Assess and Apply Impartiality in News and Current Affairs” and “Towards a Praxis-Based Media and Journalism Research.” His most recent book “A Critique of Arab Media Discourse” was published in Arabic by Arab Scientific Publishers Inc.

Notes

1. All the interviews with editors and journalists were conducted by the author in Doha, Qatar, unless indicated otherwise.

2. The interviews were conducted in Arabic and were rendered into English by the author.