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Article In: English Text Construction: Online-First Articles

Representing protesters’ voices on BBC news

 | University of Reading | University of Hail
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Abstract
The Arab Spring generated extensive international media coverage, offering a valuable context for examining how protesters’ voices are represented in television news. This article analyses how protesters were selected, represented, and mediated in BBC television news coverage of the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Drawing on Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, and using Van Leeuwen’s social actor categories, it examines the verbal, visual, and audio resources through which protesters’ voices were constructed, and how Arabic-language voices were rendered for an English-speaking audience. The dataset comprises 54 BBC news programmes, totalling roughly 600 minutes of footage and 640 still images, analysed using NVivo. Protesters were the most frequently represented social actors, particularly in headlines, yet were seldom afforded direct speech; their voices were conveyed largely through chanting, background audio, crowd imagery, gesture, placards, and camera work. The study shows how multimodal resources shaped protesters’ visibility, salience, and positioning within this coverage.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Research design
    • 3.2Data collection
    • 3.3Coding
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Audio elements
    • 4.2Visual elements
    • 4.3Inclusion and placement of protesters’ voices
      • 4.3.1Inclusion: Voice frequency and verbal duration
      • 4.3.2Headlines
    • 4.4Features of social actors
      • 4.4.1Introduction of the protesters
      • 4.4.2Male vs. female
    • 4.5Language and translation
      • 4.5.1Language use among protesters
      • 4.5.2Patterns of translation use
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1The selection and representation of voices
    • 5.2Multimodal representation of voice
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Author queries
  • References
References (50)
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