Conflicts as Causes to Change News Foci Frequency Analysis for Asharq Al-Awsat and Al-Khaleej Newspapers Before and After the Arab Spring (Published)

Article Author: Ahmad S Haider

The Arab Media, both pan-Arab and national, have helped people in the Arab world to achieve a greater amount of freedom and liberty in the last two decades. This was observed in 2011, when the Arab region witnessed a series of revolutions and protests that not only affected the Middle East and North Africa, but also the whole world. This study uses a new 19.5-million word corpus of newspaper articles published between 2009 and 2013 to examine the main discussed themes in Asharq Al-Awsat (a pan-Arab newspaper) and Al-Khaleej (a UAE national newspaper). Using the corpus linguistic technique of frequency, this study shows that the focus of the two newspapers in 2011, the year when most of the protests began and ended, was similar in spite of the differences in their agendas and policies. This study concludes that the occurrence of an event that affects most of the Arab countries has an impact on the type and style of Arab national newspaper coverage.