Critical discourse analysis of the Iraq conflict in the British and German 'quality' press

Abstract

This paper focuses on how the British and German 'quality' press has dealt with the warfare interests of the US administration in Iraq. In this context, particularly the papers' presentation practices with regard to the ostensible existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and the alleged terrorist connection of al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein will be closely investigated. In order to operationalise this research agenda, I follow a cultural heuristics of research that consists of a social studies approach and the application of pragmalinguistic methods (including the analysis of frames, conceptual metaphors, speech acts, schemata of communication etc.) from a genre-based perspective. By virtue of this framework, it becomes possible to determine press genres and their cultural impact as well as the borderlines of discourse cultures about the de-/construction of war. The findings comprise a wide variety of empirical evidence for the shaping of policy lines in the papers' front page articles from a comparative intra-European perspective.