Meaning Making in the News: A Discourse Analysis on Global Protest

ABSTRACT: This study explores how the American mainstream media constructed the protests in Tunisia, North America, and Greece, in 2010-2011. My focus is on how mainstream media discourses and narratives function, how they shape and fix meaning in a way that excludes alternative views and alienates groups inside and outside of Western societies. Through the analysis of The New York Times coverage of these three events I explore how different expressions reproduce or transform protest discourse and what other discourses they draw upon. My approach in this study is that of a bricoleur, utilizing the discourse analysis approach of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe which, rather than offering a methodology as a totality within itself, promotes an open and interactive exploration of the subject matter. I engage in a cultural studies approach in terms of representation, notions of orientalism and post colonialism from Edward Said and Robert J.C. Young, and Derrida’s deconstruction and his notion “democracy to come”. I focused on news texts to uncover the ways in which meaning is made—in terms of concepts such as democracy, revolution, protest, and dissent in regards to culture, ethnicity, economy, geo-political region—of events, as well as trace the struggle to fix meaning when established views of the world are being contested. In this thesis I argue that the production of meaning is a political process that organizes the world in particular ways to the exclusion of others. Both apparently objective discourses and those caught up in political processes or struggles attempt to fix meaning in ways that have consequences for the social world. Keywords: Discourse Analysis, Occupy Wall Street, Protest, Democracy, Bricoleur, New York Times. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………