Framing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis of News Articles on the Israeli-Palestinian War

After Hamas' attack on October 7th, 2023, the long-lasting conflict between Israel and Palestine tragically escalated, attracting worldwide media attention. Over the first year of war, news outlets have extensively reported on its developments and, influenced by their various ideologies, they produced divergent and even biased narratives. This study examines the extent to which two Italian online newspapers, Corriere.it and LiberoQuotidiano.it, portrayed the conflict differently, with the hypothesis that the differences between their discursive choices are attributable to the outlets' ideologies. To do that, two specialized corpora consisting of 200 articles published between October 2023 and October 2024 were compiled and examined using Sketch Engine. Following the principles of Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis, the comparative analysis of the results combined quantitative methods, such as keywords and collocation analysis, with qualitative insights into discursive strategies. At the various linguistic levels examined, the analysis highlighted different strategies in the representation of reality, that can be traced back to the ideological positions of the newspapers. The results provide evidence of biased coverage on the Israeli-Palestinian war in the Italian context and suggest the importance of recognizing the role of ideology in the press, to avoid misinformation.