Semester
Summer
Date of Graduation
2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Type
MS
College
Reed College of Media
Department
Reed College of Media
Committee Chair
Joseph Jones
Committee Member
Daniel Brewster
Committee Member
Bob Britten
Abstract
Media organizations play a central role in shaping public understanding of international conflict. Following the publication of a leaked internal editorial memorandum from The New York Times in 2024 advising reporters to avoid terms such as "genocide," "ethnic cleansing," and "occupied territory," questions emerged regarding institutional influence and ideological framing in coverage of the Palestinian and Israeli conflict. This study examined how The New York Times discursively constructed the conflict between October 7, 2023, and October 10, 2025, using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) informed by KhosraviNik's (2010) three-level analytical framework. A purposive sample of 119 hard-news articles was analyzed using a diachronic corpus approach. Headlines and ledes were examined to analyze the representation of social actors, the attribution of agency, and the construction of broader ideological arguments across early and later stages of the conflict. Findings revealed persistent asymmetries in representation. Israeli civilians were more frequently individualized through personal names, family relationships, and biographical detail, while Palestinian civilians were predominantly represented through collectivized categories, functional roles, and casualty statistics. Hamas was consistently assigned explicit agency through active grammatical constructions, whereas reports describing Palestinian casualties more frequently employed passive voice, nominalization, and inanimate agents that backgrounded responsibility for Israeli military actions. This study reveals how routine linguistic choices — including naming strategies, agency attribution, and lexical selection — shape public understandings of conflict and suggests that, despite changes in scope, The New York Times' core patterns of representation remained largely consistent throughout the reporting period
Recommended Citation
Graham, Faithlyn H., "Constructing the 'Other': A CDA of Social Actor Representation and Agency Attribution in The New York Times reporting on Palestine and Israel (2023–2025)" (2026). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD). 13451.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/13451