Image Analysis of Online News Coverage of the 25th January Egyptian Revolution

Media discourse is considered a good example of how different modes of communication are employed to produce meanings which construct ideological representations of events and situations. The study seeks to investigate the role of images in media discourse as an important mode of communication in constructing different representations of the events of the Egyptian revolution. Over the last two or three decades a revolution has taken place in the area of communication, and particularly in media. The images of news events have come to play an increasingly central role in the discursive practices of media channels whether they are printed newspapers, online newspapers or TV news programmes. The effect of this revolution is that language has lost its position as the central mode of communication, whereas, other modes such as visual, music, gesture,...etc., have become dominant. Thus, multimodal texts have increasingly come to dominate the sphere of social communication. There emerges the need to explore the role images play in influencing our perception to and reaction towards different events. Adopting Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) theory of multimodal discourse analysis, the study attempts to analyze the visual structures used in media discourse in order to construe different representations of the revolution. The study adopts a visual analysis of the online news of Egyptian and Arabic media that report on the 25 January Egyptian Revolution during the period from 25 of January till 11 of February 2011. Particularly, it examines ten images accompanying the news stories selected from the coverage of four major news networks: Alahram electronic gate as representative of state media on one side, and Alwafd electronic gate, Alyoum7, and Aljazeera network as representatives of oppositional media on the other side.