How to Read the 2003 Invasion of Iraq

The language of the news has been found to have a §persuasive and powerful role in reproducing §discourse of a certain party. This study aims to §illustrate that the the two opposing §parties, The United States and Iraq, viewed the war §from different perspectives, thus producing §different discourses. A corpus of 90 news reports §taken from two English language newspapers, 'The New §York Times', published in the United States of §America and 'The Daily Star', published in Lebanon, §are analyzed using Halliday s transitivity model and §Lakoff s conceptual metaphors. The transitivity §model shows that each class of verbs creates §meanings and leads to implications on the part of §the reader in addition to insinuating a relationship §between news reporting and power. The results of the §conceptual metaphors show how each party justified §its course of action through the construction of §its own version of the 'fairy tale' of the war. §This study concludes that though the two newspapers §are reporting the same events, there are often two §different discourses that emerge in the reports §about the war which may in turn affect its readers §differently.