CDA: Qatar World Cup in Newspaper Headlines in the Times and Jutarnji List

Abstract

Abstract World sports tournaments have diverse economic, political, social, and cultural ramifications. 2022 FIFA World Cup is the first world cup tournament organized in an Arab country, and is described by The Times as “the most controversial World Cup of all time”. Football has become more than just a sport in many countries, but an integral part of culture and society. The aim of our study is to analyze media representation of FIFA World Cup 2022 in British and Croatian respectable daily newspapers. The corpus is composed of newspaper headlines published in The Times and Jutarnji list from 01 December to 21 December, 2022. The analytical framework used for the analysis is Fairclough’s three- dimensional framework, complemented by Van Dijk’s approach to newspaper discourse. At the description level textual analysis is conducted with the focus on sentence predication (passive sentences), at the interpretation level headlines are analyzed from the perspective of modes of discourse representation, and at the explanation level they are analyzed from aspects of societal contexts. Particular prominence is given to newspaper headlines in this study since their function is to indicate the topic, attract readers’ attention and evoke particular cultural context. According to van Dijk (1989) headlines express underlying macrostructure, the topical organization of the news discourse. The aim of our study is to apply this critical perspective on selected samples of headlines and determine how news discourses are organized with reference to different social and cultural contexts.