A Meta Discourse Analysis of the Palestine-Israel Narratives: Framing Conflict in Malaysian Digital Sphere

The Israel–Palestine conflict has been a focal point of international media attention, whereby media coverage transcends the mere communication of fact to the construction of counter-narratives (Alsaafin, 2023; BBC, 2024; Hope et al., 2024). Along with the advent of the internet era, the contribution of internet media has increased as well: their choice of words, rhetorical appeals, and framing are capable of influencing how people comprehend, construct ideological positions on, and influence intercultural openness towards human tragedies (Choi, 2021; Chow et al., 2024). Covering such conflicts is rarely neutral because it entails a subtle balance of stance and assessment that can implicitly affect the way readers read events as they occur (Choi, 2021).
Although meta discourse analysis has been widely applied to scholarly writing and argumentative texts, its application to online crisis news coverage is still an underexplored territory. According to studies by Arrosyid and Halwati (2021), Heni and Chandra (2022), and Ali et al. (2024), news media produce varied constructions of the crisis through employing certain framing choices, rhetorical strategies, and linguistic resources. With that, this paper aims to further examine the way interactional metadiscourse such as hedges, boosters, hedges, attitude markers, engagement markers and self-mentions are used in online coverage of the Palestine-Israel conflict. Through the identification of these interactional markers, the study aims to explore how online crisis news discourse signals institutional stance and shapes public perception in the online world.
This research contributes to the existing body of knowledge of media studies and discourse analysis by providing deeper insights as to how interactional metadiscourse markers are used in Malaysian hard news reporting, especially in politically sensitive crises such as the Palestine-Israel conflict. Furthermore, this study further adds to the communicative and ethical worth of metadiscourse, especially when subtle linguistic cues, depending on how it is used, can assist in prejudice, reinforce ideological beliefs or introduce more balance in online crisis news reporting. Therefore, by highlighting these strategies, the study not only enriches understanding on metadiscourse markers and its function in online news media articles but also encourages ethical reporting and media literacy towards neutrality and factual accuracy. Ultimately, this would better equip media practitioners and the public with the skills to critically read crisis news articles in Malaysian digital sphere.

metadiscourse, journalistic narratives, Palestine-Israel conflict

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