The construction of news is not haphazard. It is institutional in the sense it is a fundamental part of the content media organizations churn out in accordance with certain standards, styles, rules, and rituals. As such, organizational discourse, whether news or any other genre, according to Fairhurst (2009, p. 1608), would represent “a constellation of perspectives united by the view that language does not mirror reality, but constitutes it”. Thus news discourses organizations employ are a “structured collection of texts embodied in the practices of talking and writing (as well as a wide variety of visual representations and cultural artefacts) that bring organizationally related objects into being as these texts are produced, disseminated and consumed”. Phillips et al. (2004, p. 636) assert that the unravelling of social reality of an organization entails “the systematic study of texts—including their production, dissemination, and consumption—in order to explore the relationship between discourse and social reality.” This paper is an inquiry into the news discourse of a global, multilingual broadcaster with the aim of presenting a method on how to investigate news from a postfoundational discourse analysis perspective (henceforth PDA). Despite its popularity as a discourse analysis tool, PDA still “suffers from a quite considerable methodological deficit”. The paper demonstrates that the deficit PDA suffers from can be overcome with recourse to other approaches, specifically critical realist discourse studies (RDS). The following section presents an outline of the major tenets of PDA and then it shows how its combination with RDS can help remedy some of its shortcomings.

The article examines Al Jazeera’s internal guidelines. It focuses attention on the broadcaster’s editorial policies and practices, how they are created, the way they shape news content, and whether they are documented or not. It attempts to shed light on the role of external stakeholders and regulatory devices with a say on the editorial line and subsequently the type of internal editorial policies and practices journalists are required to pursue. It presents a comparative study and analysis of the network’s two major and most influential channels, namely Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Jazeera English, the arguments in support of their editorial policies and practices, and the arguments opposing them. It scrutinizes how different forms of internal guidelines and regulatory frameworks affect the network’s discourse, ties with its financiers, and relations with the outside world. Finally and based on the findings obtained through interviews, and linguistic discourse analysis, the article outlines how internal guidelines come into being in the case of Al Jazeera and how they eventually influence the final product. 

This paper develops some discursive resources and models to analyze how and why disinformation permeates mainstream media. It draws on certain linguistic strategies and propaganda models helpful to unravel disinformation in mainstream media coverage, with focus placed on two main Arabic speaking 24/7 news channels in the Middle East. These strategies and models are used to conduct exploratory critical analyses of data drawn from the online news websites of the two news outlets. The paper presents the trends characterizing disinformation in the Middle East, but more importantly the discursive and social patterns and practices the media employ when publishing news intended to discredit and harm rather than inform. The study's contribution is twofold: First, it provides a discursive framework for the analysis of disinformation in traditional news outlets. Second, it provides an analytical framework to investigate how disinformation pervades mainstream media. The study's data and analysis support the lines of research on how patriotic ethics guide coverage and how the selection of discursive patterns responds to interests of hegemonic powers with a © 2021 Leon Barkho, published by De Gruyter.

Hacked and leaked content has become a major source of information for the mainstream news, particularly in the years since Donald Trump snatched the official Republican presidential nomination in 2016. This chapter seeks to identify some salient policies and practices the news media have adopted in their coverage of the rise of Trump to power. Indeed, there is a plethora of literature on the role hackers and leakers as well as news fakers play in today’s journalism (Eggen, 2006; Gunkel, 2005; Jaworski, Fitzgerald, & Morris, 2004; Lievrouw, 2011; Roberts, 2012; Son, 2002; Vegh, 2003). We even have a new theory with a set of principles designed to test, interpret, and predict the phenomenon. Called “haktology,” the theory examines the processes of gaining illegal and unauthorized access to information, its subsequent disclosure to reporters and activists, its transmutation into news reports, and the impact such reports leave on public opinion.

This article analyses a special case to illustrate paradigmatic rectification in news production that took place at the turn of the century. The special case concerns Tony Burman, a former head of Canada’s CBC and former managing director of the global news channel Al Jazeera English. Burman drew the journalistic community’s attention through ‘editorial remedies’ that saw the emergence of a special way of news coverage rarely practised by mainstream western media. Burman’s news model holds that all people or actors involved in an event determined newsworthy are equal and matter to the story in the same way regardless of their power. This article examines Burman’s news model as a shared mindset among members of a 24/7 news organization, focusing on the principles of objectivity, event and news values.