War against Terror Impacts on Pakistan’s Economy: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Pakistani Newspapers

Abstract

The present research is an attempt to explore the discourses of political cartoons published in Pakistani Urdu and English newspapers representing the war against terror impacts on Pakistan’s economy. Newspapers’ linguistic and semiotic representations of war against terror impacts on Pakistan’s economy are ideologically loaded and employed in the construction and deconstruction of the realities of post 9/11 scenario in a desired way. The research uses multimodal critical discourse approach (Machin, 2007) along with Van Leeuwen’s framework for recontextualisation (2008) and Fairclough’s (2003) framework for visual and linguistic analyses of the political cartoons to explore the hidden ideologies. The visual and linguistic analyses of the political cartoons pay careful attention to how discourses are chosen and then represented visually and linguistically to promote particular interests and ideologies that shape public perception of the reality.