Syria in its Arab Spring Swinging Between Shaky Stability and Bloody Chaos

Abstract

This study aimed to explore Arab spring consequences that prevailed in Syria after 2010-2011 as reflected by CNN in its online news articles released in its website 2013. The main concern of the study is to unveil CNN's hidden ideologies towards Arab spring upheaval in Syria investigating itsm discoursal ''Self'' and ''Other'' representations. To achieve this goal, the researcher utilized thefollowing theories: 1) van Dijk's theory of Semantic Macrostructure (1980); to examine macro and micro structures of CNN's online news article, 2) van Dijk's theory of Ideological Square (1998c); to examine CNN's ideologies embedded within its online news article and 3) Wodak's DiscourseHistorical Approach; to endorse linguistic and ideological analysis of CNN's online news article. Fairclough's three-dimensional Approach was utilized to organize the process of analysis of the study text. Within the linguistic analysis, macro and micro structures of CNN's online news articles were analyzed. At the macro level, the semantic macrostructure was outlined to determine its global meaning. At the micro level, the syntactic, lexical and rhetorical structures were examined to determine their local meaning. Within the ideological analysis, the CNN's online news article was analyzed to determine its ideological positive ''Self'' (in-group) and negative ''Other'' (out-group) presentations. The findings revealed that CNN's ideological orientations towards Syria were varied. Thus, it presented the Syrian internal conflict as the positive "Self" identities while the Syrian regime as the negative "Other'' identities