tv.um.es

Diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and the US began in 1933, when "a friendship and trade agreement" was signed (Abukhalil, 2004, p. 181). However, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 affected the relationship between the two countries since most of the attackers were of Saudi origins. Thus, Saudi Arabia received much attention from the media and was seen as being directly or indirectly behind what happened. According to Alyas (2007), the American people, media and even the government have criticized the kingdom, linking it to the terrorist attacks. Despite the considerable work into the construction of countries in the media, there is almost no research into the linguistic or discursive representation of Saudi Arabia. Therefore, this study aims to explore and analyse news texts about Saudi Arabia in the American press. It further aims at examining which discursive strategies and linguistic structures are instrumental in constructing the image of Saudi Arabia.
The corpus under study comprises four sub-corpora of news articles published in two American newspapers: the New York Times and the Washington Post in four different periods; 1980-81, 1990-1991, 2001-2002, and 2010-2011. This study draws on methodologies from Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. A central theoretical notion in the corpus analysis of the study is keyword analysis, which can present an initial focus for the analysis. A second important concept of CL that is relevant to this study is collocation analysis which can reveal the most prominent discourses and meanings associated with the representation of Saudi Arabia. It also follows van Leeuwen's (1996) representations of social actors and Wodak's predicational strategies (2001).
The research reveals that Saudi Arabia is mostly associated with topics related to war and conflict, politics, oil, terrorism and religion. The occurrence of these topics varies from one period to another in terms of their saliency, depending on events taking place at the time. The representation of Saudi Arabia in relation to the major themes/topics is mostly negative. While Saudi Arabia is predominantly represented as an important ally to the US, it is also constructed negatively as an unreliable ally. It is worth noting that negative references and attributions are often employed in controversial issues throughout the years. In 2001-02, the discursive strategies are mostly found in news articles that highlight the relationship of Saudi Arabia to extreme Islamic ideology as well as terrorism. Saudi Arabia is depicted as supporting a strict version of Islam that promotes extremism and produces terrorist groups. In 2010-11 sub-corpus, the strategies are mostly found in reports about its role during the uprising in the Arab world. In this period, the news continues to construct Saudi Arabia as a main financial supporter of extremism employing activation and functionalization strategies. By tracing the diachronic change across the four periods, this research also demonstrates how the recycle of old news may reinforce perceived predominant stereotypes about Saudi Arabia.