The Language of Crisis: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of COVID-19 Reporting in Pakistani and American Newspapers

Abstract

The year 2020 has been an unusual year due to the pandemic and related issues, during which newspapers have been the most impactful medium for communication. The purpose of this research is to investigate how covid-19 has been visually represented and verbally communicated to readers in Pakistan and America through newspapers. The objectives of the study are to investigate the social identities given to the participants in the pictures and secondly, how the pandemic has been experienced in the verbal news reports to create a reality. Linguistic data has been analyzed by using the Transitivity kit, developed by Halliday in Systemic Functional Linguistics (2014), while the visuals are analyzed through the Visual Grammar Theory, presented by Kress and Leeuwen (2006). Visuals projects Pakistanis as rebellious, lawbreakers, and Chinese as victorious and strugglers, while Americans have portrayed the Chinese as inferior and in utter chaos to handle the pandemic. Similarly, in both countries material processes are the most frequent leading to the verbal and the least used mental processes, but both have used them to develop different ideologies, in Pakistani’s case, authorities have been shown highly sensitive towards socioeconomic issues of hunger and despite their best efforts they have been advised to be patient and take it as a trial of God. On the other hand, Americans have been shown striving for developing the vaccine, and at the same considering the virus as a petty issue, yet ready to combat it on all fronts.