Text Analysis of the Online News Coverage of the 25th January Egyptian Revolution: A Systemic Functional Grammar Perspective

The media coverage of the Egyptian eighteen-day revolution has been controversial, as each media network has a different representation of the unfolding of events of the protests in Egypt, which springs from its own set of ideologies. Thus, media networks have played different roles in the course of the revolution. Some of them have been legitimizing the revolution, others have been demonizing it. There emerges the need to explore the role that news media have played in influencing our perception to and reaction towards the events of the revolution. Adopting Halliday's theory of systemic functional grammar, the study attempts to analyze the discursive structures used in media discourse in order to construe different representations of events. The study reports the discursive analysis of the online news of Egyptian and Arabic media that report on the 25th January Egyptian Revolution during the period from 25th of January till 11th of February 2011. Particularly, it examines the discursive aspects of the ten headlines of the news stories selected from the coverage of four major news networks: Alahram electronic gate as a representative of state media on one side, and Alwafd electronic gate, Alyoum7, and Aljazeera network as representatives of oppositional media on the other side