Media portrayal of Algerian students’ protests: Discourse analysis of national and international news values of Echorouk and New York Times

• In Event: Power of Media: Representation, Literacy, and Democracy

Proposal

This study focuses on the media portrayal of student protestors and the state in the 2019 Hirak protests in Algeria with a goal of understanding the power structures underlying the national and international media representation. Using news values analysis as a research framework, this study compares the scale, actors, and images of actors of the protests in Echorouk, Algerian Arabic national newspaper and the New York Times, an English international newspaper.

The year of 2019 witnessed different socio-political movements across the world that challenged oppressive and unjust political structures, and “The Hirak '' protest in Algeria was among the widely covered event in the national and international media. “The Hirak”— Arabic word for movement— also called “Revolution of Smiles” was a series of weekly protests that took place around different parts of the country in 2019 to express the discontent of ‘the Wretched of the Earth’ (Fanon,1963). Algeria protests resemble the Arab Spring in terms of objectives, yet non-violence is what characterizes it from former local protests as well as different global ones. To express their dissatisfaction with the incapacitated president Bouteflika seeking re-election, Algerian citizens chose to voice their opposition peacefully in the streets and the most prominent actors that contributed to its mobilization are university students.

Media coverage in its different forms, both national and international, could be viewed as a crucial tool to explore the mechanisms of protests and the way power manifests in the news representation. In fact, there are different studies that addressed the portrayal of protests in the media in different contexts using both qualitative and quantitative research methodology (e.g., McCarthy, Scharf and Dore, 2021; Harlow, S., & Johnson, 2011; Afzal & Harun, 2020; Kessar et. al, 2021). However, studies that examined the representation of Algeria Hirak protests in national and international media using a critical/ decolonial perspective are scarce.

Guided by Freirean “anti-dialogical praxis” (Freire, 1970) as well as Walsh & Mignolo’s (2018) concept of “decoloniality as a praxis”, this study addresses issues of power and the way they play out in the language of the international/ Western and national/postcolonial newspapers. To achieve this objective, the following questions are framed: (1) What are the similarities and differences between the national and the international newspapers' portrayal of the Algerian students’ protestors in terms of the scale and the main actors? (2) How are student protestors and the state represented in national and international newspapers? (3) What ideologies are adopted by the national and international newspapers in portraying the state and the student protestors?

To address the research questions, the study adopts a critical discourse analysis framework that focuses on new values developed by Bednarek and Caple (2017). The adopted news values are grouped into three components of the protest: scale, actors and the image of actors. Scale of the protest is in turn associated with three news values: Superlativeness (i.e., the scale of the protest), Unexpectedness (i.e., uniqueness of the protest), and Impact (i.e., political and social consequences of the protest). Actors of the protest are related to two news values: Personalization (i.e. non elite actors) and Eliteness (i.e. high status actors). Images of the actors are associated with two news values: Negativity and Positivity (i.e, attitudes of the media towards different represented actors as well as attitudes between the represented actors).

Data are collected from Echorouk and New York Times during 2019. Echorouk is the most widely read Arabic newspaper in Algeria, whereas The New York times is one of the most important English newspapers that has a wide international audience. Keywords such as students, Hirak, Algeria, 2019 and the name of the newspaper were used for searching relevant news reports.10 newspapers from Echorouk and 9 newspapers from the New York Times meet the criterion were considered for coding.

In terms of RQ 1, both the national and the international newspapers highlighted the large-scale nature of the protests. Both newspapers’ reports focused on the depiction of oppositional figures manifested in the protesters and academics as well as authorities, namely president, army, police, and government officials. However, while the international newspaper included the opposing politicians, civic groups and figures, the national newspaper included actors such as national symbols (i.e., Algerian revolution Martyrs) and the former colonial power, i.e., France.

In terms of RQ 2, findings suggest that both the national and international newspapers use a positive portrayal of protesters and negative portrayal of Bouteflika government. However, whereas the national newspaper focused on the active role played by university students, the solidarity between protesters, police and the army, the international newspaper illustrated the force used by the police against the protesters as well as the different tactics used by the national army to manipulate the protestors.

In terms of RQ3, the national newspaper adopted a nationalistic decolonial perspective in the depiction of the protests which resembles the historical revolutionary protests during the French colonialism as well as highlighting the importance of the sovereignty of the Algerian nation-state that is symbolized in the brotherhood between the people and the army. Conversely, the international newspaper adopted a pro-democracy stance that highlights the tension between the protesters and the authoritarian regime including the government, the police and the national army.

This research is significant in three different ways. First, the cross-linguistic analysis of Arabic and English newspapers offers important contributions to the field of critical media literacy and the way power structures play out in the national and international media coverage of student protests. Second, the findings contribute to the ongoing conversation on the dialectics of the local and the global to advance the field of Comparative and International Education. Third, the findings contribute to the literature on the analysis of news values which is an emerging methodological framework in discourse analysis.

Authors

• fadhila hadjeris, UCLA

• Yiping Wang, UCLA