The project has developed a detailed methodology to conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis of newspapers, the first pilar of the MAGIC project.
The methodology adopts Critical Discourse Analysis as an analytical framework for a starting corpus of 6 national newspapers (3 from Belgium and 3 from Spain). Critical Discourse Analysis focuses on discursive analysis and studies, mainly the way in which abuse of power and social inequality are portrayed, reproduced, legitimised and persist in text and speech in social and political contexts (Van-Dijk, 2016), and is already used in studies on the portrayal of Islam and Muslim women in the British press (Alkhammash, 2020).
The methodology focuses on three constant aspects in studies on the portrayal of Muslims in the media:
- Otherness based on the discourse of us vs. them, an us to which only positive characteristics are attributed compared to a them marked by negative attributions, and which only increases ignorance and rejection
- The consensual cultural image based on Western existentialist and ethnocentric interpretations of Eastern societies
- The Orientalist discourse that continues to legitimise long-implemented hegemonic military policies in Muslim majority countries, or migration security policies (Laura Navarro, 2010).
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