Media framing in the Israel-Palestine conflict: Corpus based lexical analysis of Fox News and Al Jazeera

The Israel-Palestine conflict has become one of the most widely reported global issues, attracting significant attention from international media as it shapes public understanding of the conflict. News media play a crucial role in constructing reality through language, particularly in how they frame actors, and events. Previous studies have examined media framing of the conflict. However, limited attention has been given to corpus-based analysis focusing on lexical choices. Therefore, this study aims to analyse the lexical choices used by Fox News and Al Jazeera in reporting the Israel�Palestine conflict to uncover how each media outlet frames the issue. The significance of this study lies in contributing to the field of linguistics, particularly in framing and corpus linguistics, as well as enhancing readers’ critical awareness in interpreting media narratives. This study applies a corpus-based mixed-method approach. The quantitative analysis is conducted through corpus analysis using LancsBox to identify lexical choices, particularly nouns, verbs, and adjectives, in news reports from Fox News and Al Jazeera. The quantitative results are then interpreted qualitatively using the four analytical functions of framing theory (1993). This study aims to reveal how both media outlets frame the Israel-Palestine conflict through their lexical choices. The data collection technique used in this study is documentation, with data collected from online news articles published between October 7th and November 30th, 2023.The findings show that Fox News and Al Jazeera use distinct lexical choices to construct different representations of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Fox News tends to employ lexical items related to security and violence, frequently labeling Hamas as “terrorists,” which appears prominently in the corpus 119 occurrences, framing Palestinian actors as sources of threat. In contrast, Al Jazeera uses lexical choices that emphasize humanitarian aspects, frequently employing terms such as “humanitarian,” which occurs 159 times, to highlight civilians and victims and portray Palestinians as those affected by the conflict, while presenting Israel as a dominant source of violence. These patterns are reflected in the recurring use of specific lexical items and their collocations across both corpora. This study concludes that lexical choice functions as an effective linguistic strategy in shaping media framing and influencing how audiences perceive the conflict