A Corpus-assisted Critical Analysis of the Representation of the Egyptian Army: Evidence from the British and Egyptian Press

One of the significant changes that took place in Egypt in the last decade is the 30th of June Revolution, which brought the country into the spotlight of international media. The protests had a big effect on the Egyptian Army, which played a key role in the events and was represented either positively or negatively in the media outlets for its role in instigating the change. The present study aims at examining the linguistic representation of the Egyptian Military, as one of the main social actors of the June 30 protests, in the British and Egyptian newspapers. A corpus of about a 6 million words of Egyptian newspaper articles and 4 million words of British newspaper articles is collected through the news database, LexisNexis. The analysis is conducted using a synergy of Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics. The corpus linguistic techniques of collocations and concordances are employed using the softwares AntConc and CQP. For the analysis of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation, the study adopts Reisigl and Wodak’s (2001) Discourse Historical Approach of critical discourse analysis. The findings revealed that the portrayal of the Egyptian military in the British newspapers underwent a substantial transformation, evolving from a more neutral or positive stance before the outbreak of the protests to a highly negative representation in the postuprisings period. In contrast, the positive portrayal of the military by the Egyptian media remained consistent and did not change across both the pre- and post-uprisings periods.