Abstract
The coalition between the US and Pakistan on the war on terror in the wake of 9/11 terrorist attacks have been researched well across various disciplines. As the Pakistani President as well as military General Pervez Musharraf has been one of the key figures of this alliance, there is a need to probe if he is presented as a hardcore or a dubious ally, and what does such coverage reveal about the magazine’s policy towards Pakistan. For scrutinizing the delineation of Musharraf, the corpus comprising of 509 articles (published in the Time magazine form September 11, 2001 to Dec 2010) has been formulated. Further his presentation is analysed via Wordsmith concordance program, and Graph Coll. The collocates with the core Musharraf* (the Noun-Noun combination) are further categorized into semantic categories using corpus assisted critical discourse analysis. Using the notions of semantic preference and prosody, the study reveals that Musharraf’s identity is fostered as a politician rather than as a military man. Moreover, there is strong association between him and the President Bush. This notion is further strengthened statistically (p < 0.05). He is also presented as a figure engulfed in variant problems. Such projection where there is silence on the democracy till 2007 is in alliance with the US foreign policy towards Musharraf and Pakistan in general. It means that mirror model of news production is not the magazine’s policy and the media understudy has political alliances with the US government.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Ally, Semantic Categories
