Reform, Fighting Corruption, and Countering Terrorism by the Jordanian media: A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Jordanian Local News Articles

Abstract

This study combines the quantitative tools of computational linguistics and the qualitative methods of critical discourse analysis to examine the terms reform, corruption, and terrorism in Jordanian media before, during, and after the Arab Spring. The study builds three sub-corpora representative of the three periods under investigation: the pre-uprising corpus consists of 2059 news items from 2005 to 2009; the during-uprising corpus includes 2957 news items from 2011 to 2012; and the post-uprising corpus has 2436 news items from 2016 to 2017. In data analysis, the study uses the tools provided by AntConc software program to uncover the sociopolitical factors and challenges associated with reform, fighting corruption, and countering terrorism in Jordan. The findings of the study reveal that local news stories about terrorism, corruption, and reform differ significantly in terms of frequency and content in the pre-, post-, and during-uprising periods. The study indicates that sociopolitical conditions influence news coverage of the topics reform, corruption, and terrorism and that news articles are the medium where social and political events are manifested.