SECURITY AS DISCOURSE: COMPARING THE OFFICIAL DISCOURSE OF OBAMA ADMINISTRATION AND MEDIA DISCOURSE OF NEW YORK TIMES IN SYRIAN CONFLICT

Abstract

Since the uprisings in Syria from 2011, the conflict is represented by the US in the language of morality and national identity through media. The discursive construction of the identity of President Bashar al-Assad or Syrian regime, and its dissemination into the mass population by media that opened the possibility for the Obama administration to intervene in Syria. The US had taken various actions in Syria against regime in Syria justifying in the name of security for both citizens of Syria and the US such as sanctions and arming the rebels. The President Obama exhibited Bashar al-Assad as a ‘repressive dictator’ who used the chemical weapons against citizens. For this, the study uses discourse analysis in combination with poststructuralism as a means of comprehending the U.S. intervention in Syria. The presidential speeches of Obama (official discourse) and New York Times' editorials (media discourse) are analyzed using discourse analysis to explore the relation between media and the US foreign policy in the Syrian conflict. The concepts predication, presupposition, and subject-positioning understood as textual mechanism are used, in order to analyze the relation between official discourse and media discourse. The study asserts that security issues are not objective realities but socially and discursively constructed within political discourse. To support the assertion, it is demonstrated that The New York Times reproduced the official discourse against Bashar al-Assad or Syrian regime that became hegemonic by marginalizing the alternative perspectives.