Investigating Discourse Bias in Arabic–English News Headlines of the War on Gaza: A Critical Discourse Analysis of BBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera

Abstract

This study undertakes a critical investigation into discourse bias by conducting a comparative analysis between Arabic and English news coverage of the War in Gaza, examining how ideological framing is enacted across different linguistic discourses. The research addresses the empirical gap concerning how institutional editorial policies strategically shape the media's narrative of this conflict. Adopting a qualitative, descriptive-analytical approach based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the study analyzes 20 news headlines from Al Jazeera, the BBC, and CNN. The findings conclusively establish that discourse bias is a systematic ideological process driven by institutional agendas. Key patterns of bias in the English discourse are identified as: the systematic erasure of Israeli agency through strategic use of the passive voice and nominalization; the lexical neutralization of ideologically charged terms (e.g., opting for “Killed” instead of “Martyr” used in the Arabic discourse); and the deployment of euphemistic framing to sanitize and minimize the portrayal of violence. The study concludes that news discourse functions as a central ideological apparatus, actively shaping the audience's perception of the conflict by aligning the textual output with institutional socio-political stances.