A master’s thesis in the Department of English, College of Education for Humanities, University of Basra, researched the representation of ideology and power in the speech of the New York Times: a case study of immigrants to America after the American invasion of Iraq.
The thesis by student Kawthar Hameed aimed to analyze and define ideology and authority in dealing with Iraqi immigrants. To investigate how the New York Times "represents immigrants from Iraq in political and social ideologies within the United States." and examine how multiple factors in the political agenda, reader preferences, and journalistic norms influence the representation of Iraqi immigrants in The New York Times. And a study of power practices between the United States and Iraq in the context of New York Times coverage.
The thesis included five chapters. While the first chapter is the introductory chapter that presents the problems of the study, its hypotheses, objectives, limits, procedures, questions, and the importance of the study and its difficulties, while the second chapter provides a theoretical background on ideology and its relationship to language and its types. In addition, Chapter Two provides a theoretical background on power, media discourse, the relationship between the media and the newspaper, and newspaper analysis, as well as information about immigration discourse and racism. Chapter Three provides a description of the study model, research design, and analysis procedures as well as data selection and the reason for choosing the Van Dijk framework. Chapter Four provides a comprehensive analysis of ideology and power in ten New York Times articles, and also presents a discussion of the results obtained from the articles analyzed. Finally, Chapter Five presents the results of the study and provides some recommendations and suggestions for future work.
Conclusions: The analysis revealed the newspaper’s ideology using these rhetorical tools. The newspaper often adopts a dual ideology towards immigrants. The New York Times used its power to promote its ideology. She showed strength at various levels. The newspaper's strength included its ability, first, to narrate events in accordance with its ideology, second, to present information as evidence of the veracity of its words, and third, the influence it created to show Americans in a positive way
