A Comparative Case Study of the Construal of the Persona of 3 who are ‘the worst of the worst’

Abstract

This study examines the representation of three prisoners held at Guantanamo in the online editions of four newspapers; The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian and The Independent.  It does this: by examining the verbal processes and the Participant Roles in which the three detainees were represented in the four titles over a four year period; by explicating the attributed voices used in each title’s reported discourse; and by contrasting the construals of the three detainees in reported clauses with the construals of the detainees in a small human rights corpus from the same period.  The study found that despite the newspapers’ overt claims to be opposed to the extra-judicial imprisonment of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo the representations of the three detainees suggested that the two American titles positioned themselves vis-a-vis the three prisoners ideologically as implicit promoters of a ‘national security’ discourse while the British papers managed to ideologically position themselves at times as supportive of the national security argument and at other times as supportive of the human rights discourse.