Drugs and Decriminalization Discourse Analysis

Report Length: 1200-1500 words, excluding your bibliography. Use proper in-text citation when citing your sources (APA, MLA, Chicago).
In this assignment you will analyze a current issue of relevance by using critical discourse analysis to examine messages contained in a newspaper articles (online or hard copy).
You will need to produce a written assignment that answers the questions listed throughout these instructions. As you answer these questions, please make reference to the course readings. Use proper citation and bibliography formatting in your report. Submit your assignment on Canvas for grading.
1) Getting Started
Read the newspaper articles that you will use for your discourse analysis.
a) Think about the theory of media framing and how media represents a version of reality. That version is neither correct nor wrong; rather it’s a way for media to represent and frame reality. Your task is to analyse two articles that represent “two sides a story,” typically one “pro” side and an “anti” side. The articles assigned for this assignment are:
• 2 article about the impact of foreign buyers/foreign money on Vancouver’s real estate market.
OR
• 2 articles about drug decimalization in B.C.
Question 1: Describe the topic/issue that you are going to analyze. Explain the context of your comparison. For example, are you comparing content in articles published with different audiences in mind? Or are the intended audiences the same for both articles? Why does that matter?
Question 2: Research to see who/which companies own these two publication. What’s their editorial mandate, in your assessment? For example, are their more progressive or conservative in their tone and coverage of news and current affairs? What might this suggest about the journalistic practices of these sources and their wider social implications? What’s their reputation like? Why does that matter?
2) Doing the analysis
Question 3: Explain your methodological toolbox (i.e., discourse analysis) and the properties of text and context that you will be focusing on for your analysis (See the 3 readings by van Dijk, Mautner, and Weintraub for their discussion of a methodological toolbox for doing discourse analysis). (Tip: You will not be able to look at all properties of text and context that they describe, but the assignment, as you see below, directs you to a very specific method of analysis which involves choosing a word and looking at the lexical properties of the word and its association to other words in the news articles analyzed).
Question 4: What words, keywords, and metaphors appear frequently in text. Create a list of the words/phrases/sentences that stand out in the articles. What patterns do you observe in the use of key words? What perspective do these words, phrases, metaphors, lexical structures, etc. communicate to the reader? What is the main argument/statement the article aims to make using these terms?
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Question 5: How do you think each of the articles are framing the issue? Ask yourselves: what aspects or events of a particular phenomenon do these articles highlight? Even if each article addresses the same case, each article has a different emphasis, so this also implies a specific selection/exclusion process in the representation of reality. So, what is included or excluded? Who is foregrounded or backgrounded? Why do you think these selections were made by the publication/writer?

Question 6: Are there any images accompanying the text? If so, how do the images help to frame the issue? Positively, negatively, neutral? Discuss.

Question 7: Looking at the lecture slides from Week 10, and Norman Fairlough’s diagram on discourse structure (the text, the discursive practices, and the socio-cultural practices; slide number 18), what discursive and social-cultural practices do you think inform the creation of these texts?

Question 8: In conclusion, what do you think of the framing of the topic in both of your articles? Do you see bias in these articles? How are these biases manifested? If you were to write this article, what would you focus on? Who would you interview? Why? What data/facts/language choice/etc. would you rely on?

Submit: your assignment, plus your two articles, demonstrating your analysis (for example, words highlighted, articles annotated, etc.) all as one document.