A Critical Media and Appraisal Analysis of the Coverage on Mandela’s Death in Arabic Language Media

This mixed-method corpus-based study explores the language used by Arab politicians in a TV programme on the death of Nelson Mandela. Arabs from various Arab countries were asked the question, “What does Mandela mean to you?” From Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the appraisal system is used to investigate the evaluative language expressed by those politicians in response to this question. Moreover, this study attempts a critical media analysis of the discourse of those participants from various Arab countries, who may or may not share the same ideology related to Mandela’s legacy. In addition to an analysis of the attitudes of participants towards the death of Mandela, ideologies deployed in the interviews and tweets are also analysed. The findings of this study have shown that Mandela’s legacy is the most prominent theme in the entire programme. The findings have also shown that the programme centres on a number of subthemes, such as Mandela’s principles and leadership styles, public reactions to Mandela's death, the unprecedented ways of mourning him, and comparisons between Mandela and other leaders. The appraisal analysis of the corpus revealed that Mandela and his legacy were favourably presented in the affect, judgement and appreciation systems of evaluation. As for the frequency of resources, the findings show the tendency of Arab participants in the programme to express their attitudes through judgement followed by appreciation and affect.