A Critical Discourse Analysis of Gaza Marches of Return Coverage in Selected Newspapers

The current study aimed at discovering biases through comparing the used journalistic and lexicalizations practices in quotations patterns and representations of social actors in news coverage of the Gaza Marches of Return. The selected newspapers were The Guardian, the New York Times, The Jordan Times and Haaretz. The study sample comprised 32 news articles and 8 editorials. The findings of the study revealed that more space was given to Israeli political and military actors over their Palestinian counterparts in the New York Times and Haaretz. The Guardian and the Jordan Times quotations of Palestinian civilian actors focused on human suffering and casualties themes while Haaretz and the NYT quoted them instigating deadly attacks among other themes. The use of negative themes along with negative speakers’ descriptions of Palestinian political actors revealed biased stances against Palestinian Civilian Actors. In addition, the used reporting verbs, unbalanced quotations distributions and word counts of social actors’ quotations pointed at biased practices and adoption of one party narrative in the case of the NYT, Haaretz and the Jordan Times. 


Introduction
News reporting is a profession governed by truthfulness, integrity, balance, and accuracy. Nevertheless, news is found to be presented differently to suit its audience as it can be wrapped by layers of Syntax and Semantics in its Discourse. This is evident when the same piece of information is presented differently when reported by one given news agency to another. Consequently, events are viewed differently by the news agencies reporting them, each according to their agendas (Zelizer, Park and Gudelunas, 2002;van Dijk, 2018). There is an increasing recognition of media importance and potential in covering conflicts (UNDP 2017). It has gathered scholars to study its role of the social life recently, especially with the introduction of innovative digital life style (Mihelj and Stayner 2018:4).
The case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict proves itself as an example of how ideology and political agendas play a role in the way news reporting is presented. Newspapers have been accused of bias because of their nationality, religion and political views among others. News reporting, In this case, contradicts with White"s (2000:379) news criteria, namely objectivity, accuracy and neutrality by adopting journalists" assertions.This study aims to contribute to the critical discourse library on the discourse of conflict.
Since March 30th 2018, a series of Gaza Marches of Return have emerged as a way to draw attention to the Palestinian cause. The demonstrations that sought some popular demands were confronted with Israeli army excessive force. At least 110 Palestinian protestors were killed and thousands injured only in the first month of protests by Israeli soldiers (Sanchez and Oliphant, 2018;Morris and Balousha, 2018). Reporting the events of the Gaza Marches of return by different newspapers will produce varying news accounts, each according to their agendas, ideologies, and political views. Unbalanced representations of Palestinians and Israelis social actors can be shown in textual analysis and quotation patterns.

Question of the Study
The study aims to answer the following question: 1) How are the quotation patterns of social actors and their sourcing technique used by the selected newspapers in reporting the Gaza Marches of Return?
2) How biased are the journalistic and lexicalization practices when quoting the social actors in the selected newspapers?

Significance of the Study
Unlike recent research that analyzed the two intifadas or Gaza wars, the study addresses the Gaza Marches of Return news discourse for the first time up to our knowledge. These marches were faced with sever measures by the Israeli forces. Moreover, the Marches of Return have not yet been investigated within a CDA approach to the best of the researcher"s knowledge. Moreover, the study gains importance because it will try to compare and highlight the journalistic features among The New York Times (NYT), The Guardian (GU), Haaretz (HZ) and The Jordan Times (JT).

Review of Literature
CDA adopts no specific approach, theory, or method to be performed (van Dijk, 1995:1) (Blackledge, 2005: 13). Researchers in the field apply numerous approaches that have common primary theoretical basis and assumptions. The CDA"s approaches can be referred to well-known pioneers in the field such as: Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak and Teun van Dijk and other scholars. CDA is an interdisciplinary approach because it draws on different disciplines, Ex. Linguistics, Sociology, Politics, Sociolinguistics, Media, and Psychology. And it was a method it has been employed by researchers of such fields accordingly. CDA is a modern approach; hence it gets improvements by researchers" inputs in the field and upon usage in other fields (Titscher and Jenner 2000: 78).
The CDA presentation of the discourse and society linkage avoids simplicity; it rather studies implied power used in discourse within a particular context. As a beginning, it assumes that powerful groups tend to normalize their discourse so that their dominant ideology seems like "given information" or "taken for granted". Resisting a given dominant ideology entails questioning those existing beliefs and conventions and trying to have them changed. In the study of how conventional and creative language is used, it is imperative that CDA analysts examine the given discourse in context and to analyze the "intertextual" as well as its "interdiscursive" properties. The CDA theorists regard discourse as historical. They argue that, without knowledge of its context, it may not be analyzed or understood (Wodak, 1996).

Studies on Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Reporting
Zelizer, Park & Gudelunas (2002) study focused on gather any anti-Israeli trends Palestinian Uprising "Intifada" coverage in the USA, The NYT, The Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. They concluded that all newspapers are conservative in handling the details of Israeli army treatment of Arabs, and that bias in such human issue is inevitable due to nature of the topic.
Dunsky (2008) conducted a study on US journalistic practices in reporting the Palestinian Israeli conflict in American mainstream media. Dunsky"s analyses of the news reports by twelve news outlets pointed out that they lack necessary contextualization, American role, international law and relevant agreements to the conflict. She also linked news reporting to US Foreign policy as well as providing empirical evidence of pro-Israeli news reporting bias in the American media on the Arab Israeli conflict.  ISSN 1948-5425 2020 Deprez & Raeymaeckers (2011) studied the representation of Israelis and Palestinians in the news coverage of the first and second intifada by the Flemish press. They found that the portrayal of the Palestinian actors shifted from a rather positive view during the first intifada period to a more critical portrayal during the period of the second intifada. Some newspapers favored the Israeli side by (the use of sources) while others opted the Palestinian side in (Ex. the individualization of victims). Segev and Miesch (2011), in their media study, analyzed the corpus of 14 large newspapers in five countries-the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. They found that the UK newspapers are the most critical and negative toward Israel, while Italian news the most supportive. German, French and Swiss news were relatively more neutral. They proposed that the Opinions presented in the news are not in line with public opinion as presented in annual surveys of each country. Amer (2015) analyzed the Israeli war on Gaza in 2008 by The Guardian, The Times London, The NYT and The Washington Post. His Findings indicated that the most quoted and mentioned social actors in the 2008 Israeli war on Gaza are the Israeli politicians then the Palestinian civilians. Transitivity analysis showed similarities among the four newspapers in representing the social actors, Ex. they foreground Israeli agency in achieving a ceasefire and targeting Hamas and foreground Hamas rejection of a ceasefire. Qawariq (2016) analyzed Palestinian news websites and Israeli newspapers online versions on the 2014 Gaza war. The results of his study revealed marginal ideologies in Israel that competed with a hegemonic Zionist discourse. The study also showed that Palestinian news websites subtly exploited representations of events and social actors in their struggle for power and legitimacy.

International Journal of Linguistics
Farrah (2018) studied the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a newspaper heading analysis. His data showed four key notions: the peace process the occupation, terrorism, and settlements. Farrah focused on Grammatical and lexical metaphor euphemism and stereotypes in his study.
In summary, while covering news discourse studies of the two (popular uprisings) Intifadas and both Gaza Wars, some researchers conducted their Palestinian/ Israeli conflict studies based on western news media like (Farrah 2018) (Segev and Miesch 2011, media study) (Amer 2015) (Zaher, 2009) and (Qawariq, 2016), or like Bazzi (2009) who confined her research to Arabic discourses. This study however adopts a comparative analysis of news discourse from The NYT, The GU, HZ and The JT. The reason for selecting The JT is that it is the closest well established English speaking newspaper to the Palestinian cause regardless of the Palestinian political factions on the ground.
The current study employs CDA framework to analyze the quotations distributions of each group in each newspaper to find any quantitative biases. The analysis will go further to discuss the reporting expressions used to describe those actors and the reporting expressions for their quotes. This aids to discover the images of each social actors group that newspaper represented while covering the Gaza Marches of Return. The news coverage of these protests, International Journal of Linguistics ISSN 1948-5425 2020 to this date, has not yet been discussed by any linguistic nor media studies to the best of my knowledge.

The Newspapers
The Guardian (GU) is a British daily newspaper owned by the Scott Trust that was founded in 1821 under the name The Manchester Guardian (Bold 2018). It was changed to its current name in 1959(the guardian.com). The New York Times (NYT) is a daily US newspaper that was established and published in New York City in 1851 (Van Dijk 1998, Riofrancos 2002. The Jordan Times (JT) is an independent English-language daily newspaper published on paper and online. It is created by the Jordan Press Foundation in 1975. Haaretz (HZ) "News of the Land of Israel" that is owned by Schocken family is an Israeli English newspaper. It was founded in 1918 which makes it the longest running printed newspaper in Israel (Center for Research Libraries 2018).

Data Collection
Data collection of the news articles and editorials is confined to the four news media coverage of the Gaza Marches of Return between March 30th 2018 and March 30th 2019. Data will be collected from the newspapers" websites: www.theguardian.com/international, www.nytimes.com, www.Haaretz.com, and www jordantimes.com. The corpus is classified under each newspaper name; each article will be saved separately and dated in word file format for later analysis.
In order to obtain a representative sample from the above newspapers, the study will follow a purposive sampling technique of the data. This method is widely used in qualitative research to insure optimal identification and selection of information cases that yields in effective use of limited resources (Patton, 2002, Amer 2015:69, Seale 2012). The picked sample in the study is based on similarity of the topic then their date of publication to ensure uniformity in order to compare aspects of the news pieces.
The sample of this study is made out of 32 news articles and 8 editorials. The study analyzes the distributions of inclusion and exclusion of social actors, role allocation, genericisation and specification, nomination and categorization, and functionalisation and identification, Ex. the people, a soldier, a man, "Saleh" or "Jane". Finally, further analysis of quotation patterns and sources used while covering the Gaza Marches of Return are performed. Reporting verbs like said "claimed or stated" among others will be listed, compared and analyzed. This analysis includes frequency distributions and quoting verbs that may reflect ideologies and power relation. The sample of the study follows a purposive sampling procedure of news data that follows a systematic method: 1. The selection of news stories is confined to articles published on the chosen newspapers" website pages that deal with the Gaza Marches of Return & their implications.
2. The selected news stories must only be between March 30th 2018 and March 30th 2019. ISSN 1948-5425 2020 3. Each article is labeled for word count; aggregated word count of newspaper articles is produced; finally, word averages of each newspaper are calculated.

International Journal of Linguistics
A total of eight news report and two editorials that fall or approximate the average word count in the nearest two editorials to the average word count will be selected for analysis each newspaper, four of the closest news articles and one editorial above word average are picked and another four with one editorial below average as well. This method insures that the chosen articles fall in the medium range of the discussed topics in the population of the study. In total 40 articles will be analyzed. See table 1.

Data Analysis
The analysis of quotation patterns in this study follows the classification put forward by Richardson (2007:101) who adopts Fairclough"s (2003) Intertextuality framework under the heading of internal intertexutality: quotation and reported speech. Intertextuality or emerging discourses across articles happens as the developments in the same story are portrayed over time without including themes, and meaning is more communicated by what is excluded as in fact included (Richardson, 2007). In Richardson"s study (2007:101-106), there are five quotation patterns in his model: 1. Direct Quotation refers to "exact words are included in quotation marks, they are put in a reporting clause". That means that what is written between the quotation marks is essentially the exact words of the speakers. The use of direct quotes represents "the news as a fact that is invulnerable to questioning because it is coming from an official, an informed source or a witness. They also help in any reservations by the journalist or the newspaper against what is said.
2. Indirect quotation refers to what "the reporter provides a summary of the content of what was said or written, not the actual words used". In such type, the reporter"s voice is presented by how the source writers/speakers are paraphrased. 4. Strategic Quotation refers to any "writing or thoughts of people and are placed in quotation marks in order to indicate their contentious nature" 5. Ostensible direct quotation is used when the meaning is taken from the source, but the journalist changed its structure to suit the rhetorical flow of the news piece. The clause International Journal of Linguistics ISSN 1948-5425 2020 still entails that the structure direct speech but it is conceptually different from direct quotation through use of invented similar quotations. (Richardson 2007:101-106) In this study, more focus will be given to the examination of direct and indirect quotations patterns used by the newspapers. As explained by Amer (2015), the direct and indirect quotations are the most common patterns in the news texts while other types are more used in headlines especially the strategic quotation. In addition, there is a difficulty in judging whether the quotation is invented by the newspaper as is the case of ostensible quotations to be "better than the real one" (Richardson, 2007:105).

Quotations Distributions
In the procedures of this analysis, this section analyses the distributions of quotations patterns among the social actors. The general patterns of news sources quotation employed by the newspapers is shown in Table 2. We can see that The GU assigned more quotations and word count for Israeli groups compared to the Palestinian actors groups, (34.44%) quotations and word count (33%) and assigned (29.97%) of its quotations and word count (31.1%) to the Palestinian actors. The NYT on the other hand assigned the Palestinian groups more quotations (48%) compared to Israeli sources (40%), but when calculating the word count for each group, we find that both groups have almost identical space distributions at around (42%) each. This means that even though the Palestinian actors were assigned more quotations in the news coverage of the protests, they still have the same amount of space the Israeli actors have. The JT and HZ quotations pattern for sourcing the social actors are the most radical among the population of the study. The JT assigned (54.17%) of quotations and word count (57.69%) to the Palestinian actors while the Israeli sources were assigned (33.33%) with word count (28.26%). HZ assigned (33.33%) of the quotations and word count (41.1%) to the Israeli actors while assigning (23.81%) of its quotations and word count (19.77%) for the Palestinian side. The overall distribution of quotation patterns in 2 shows that The GU and The NYT have the highest number of quotation patterns with 90 and 73 quotations and the highest word count of quotations with 3326 and 3033 words respectively. According to table 1 we find that western newspapers have more space to discuss their topics and to include sources, as The GU averages ( 1019 words) and The NYT(1422 words). When compared to HZ it has (894 words) and The JT has the least with (577 words). These distributions lead to the understanding that International Journal of Linguistics ISSN 1948-5425 2020 despite the fact that Israel killed civilians at Gaza border, they still enjoy more or equal space to defend themselves in GU and NYT.
The JT and HZ have zero direct quotes for IPA as they are assigned indirect quotations at (12.5%) for the JT and (2.38%) for HZ. HZ only official direct quotations come from the Israeli military and (14.29%) indirect. Among Israeli groups, The GU has the most direct quotation distribution of IMA (10%), while indirect (6.67%). The NYT has an equal number of quotation but higher indirect ones, (9.59%) direct and (12.33%) indirect. The JT, however, used four times more indirect (16.67%). The Use of direct quotes provides the adaptation of speakers" opinions, defense or emotions without interference from the journalist (Floyd 2000;Richardson (2007). Hence, the GU, NYT and HZ provide ground for IMA to present their narrative to their readers. The absence of quotes from Palestinian military actors comes natural due to the nature of the protests and the absence of the any militarized activities on the scene despite HZ and NYT narratives.
The distributions of other actors" quotations in GU are the highest among other newspapers with even direct and indirect quotes. The NYT has a tendency towards direct quotations for all actors. The JT has more indirect quotes of other social actors while in HZ quotes were mostly direct quotes (30.95%) compared to (14.29%) indirect quotations. It is worth noting that while JT included mainly UN actors, the NYT has the least sources of other actors. This shows that it relies less on international powers to having their input. When this pattern is compared to the GU, it asserts the inclusion of other voices in GU unlike the NYT although it has extended word limit in its articles. Table 3 provides detailed distributions of all social actors found in the study sample.

Themes and Reporting Expressions of Political Actors
All newspapers have labeled Israeli political actors group with official titles that signifies factuality and authority, Ex. [prime minister, minister, spokesperson, ambassador…]. The JT International Journal of Linguistics ISSN 1948-5425 2020 however once used a quote with an adverbial (with US backing) that indicates US leniency although it plays the main role in mediating the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Ex.  . (8 and 9). The JT, however, used the verb alleges that imply the out of group position of the quoted speaker, Ex10. Meanwhile, HZ used neutral verbs like told, said and promised. but used the verb rejected to reassure the position of the speaker of previously mentioned facts in the discourse, summarizes and reflects on what was actually happened or said (Floyd 2000). ISSN 1948-5425 2020 Examples 8. [But Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, an

Themes and Reporting Expressions of Israeli and Palestinian Civilian Actors
The used Israeli civilian actors (ICA) received professional descriptions by The GU, The NYT and HZ, Ex.[ one of the founders of Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation Israeli human rights group, an Israeli left-wing party]. These choices include genericised terms [an, one] with indefinite articles in which such genericisations in direct quotes imply a distance between the author and the taken quotes (Fairclough 1995 ISSN 1948-5425 2020

Discussion
The quantitative analysis of quotation patterns indicates higher percentages and word length of Israeli groups" quotations over Palestinian counterparts within the first part of this study signal procedural biases made by western media and by HZ. Even when the NYT allocated more quotations to the Palestinian political actors, it has allocated equal space for Israeli political actors" quotations. The JT has proven to reproduce the Palestinian actors favorably by assigning more quotations and word length to their sources. This finding comes especially in line with (Dunsky 2008) who found biases in space allocation towards Israel and (Zelizer, Park & Gudelunas 2002) who found that the frequency of reporting and length of reports were "conservative in handling the details of Israeli army treatment of Arabs", a polite description of the bias they found towards Israel. The found one party narrative in the JT comes in line with Bazzi (2009) findings illustrating Arab newspapers unique lexicalization and framing of the Palestinian and Israeli actors. these finding comes against (Deprez & Raeymaeckers 2010) findings although they used national Flemish sample, but their second attempt (2011) found that some newspapers favoured the Israeli side by (the use of sources) while others opted the Palestinian side in (Ex. the individualization of victims). In their analysis of 14 newspapers across Europe, Segev and Miesch (2011) found that UK newspapers were the most critical of Israeli actions, which contradicts the findings of (Deprez & Raeymaeckers 2010) but in line with their second study (2011).
The themes in which the social actors were assigned quotations varied as the Israeli political and military actors were mainly cited in evading responsibility of casualties and the Israeli civilian actor have the themes criticizing the killings and supporting the Israeli measures. The Palestinian political actors were mainly assigned quotations in the themes criticizing the killings, reporting casualties, supporting the protests, and instigating deadly protests while the Palestinian civilian group were assigned circumstances of Gazan, criticizing the killings, supporting the protests, instigating deadly protests. The themes in which other actors were quoted varied according to the speakers" positions. US political actors were cited in Supporting Israel while other actors have called for restraint and finding a solution. This comes in line with (Amer 2015, Philo and Berry 2004and 2011 findings that it is easy to criticize the weak party of a conflict rather than facing consequences of criticizing Israel. The analysis of the themes echoes that notion of (Deprez & Raeymaeckers 2011) (Amer 2015) (Qawariq 2016) (Farrah 2018) in the representations found by the GU and the NYT where they quoted civilian sufferings but also included Israeli voices in defending their actions.
irrelative events of conflicts to the reader"s eye. On a parallel strategy, the NYT simply blamed Hamas for orchestrating the protests according to its descriptions of Palestinian political sources. Richardson (2007) and van Dijk (1988) highlighted the importance of quotation analysis and journalistic practices that bring forward adopted narratives to the readers. This is done by providing affiliated social actors the space to express their thoughts, attitudes, and impressions on what is going on the ground. When elites are quoted in newspapers, they usually represent factual and authoritative input (Turner and Ibá ñez and Grattan 2019), but this practice reproduces the elites dominant ideologies more than other less privileged groups. All newspapers have labeled Israeli political actors group with official titles that signifies factuality and authority.

Conclusion
To answer the first research question, the study found quotation patterns indicative of news bias due to the higher percentages and word length of Israeli actors" quotations over Palestinian counterparts that signal procedural biases made by western media and by HZ. Even when the NYT allocated more quotations to Palestinian political actors, still it has allocated equal space for Israeli political actors" quotations. The JT on the other hand, has proven to reproduce the Palestinian actors favorably by assigning more quotations and word length to their sources.
To answer the second research questions, the quantitative analysis of quotations distribution in this section shows that The Guardian, HZ and The JT have adopted one party narrative, which means the dominance of certain ideas, perspectives and arguments on what is happening in the protests and gave less room to the opponent group (Palestinian side in the case of HZ, GU and Israeli side in the case of the JT) to express themselves. The use of out of group reporting verbs by The JT illustrate the negative stance of the newspaper towards what was said by the Israeli Political figures. On the other hand, the distribution of quotations patterns, their reporting verbs and themes in which they were quoted identify the authority and impact of Israeli military actors in HZ and The NYT. The use of specific quotations themes in HZ and The NYT conveyed the Israeli actors" narrative and defense with quotations that imply hostility of Hamas or the protesters.
Further research on the role of quotations patterns, quoting expressions and word count with a different sample can draw on the representations of social actors in the news.