Critical Discourse Analysis of BBC Coverage of the October 7 War Prior to Trump’s Plan Announcement 10.35781/1637-000-147-007

Abstract

Abstract This study aims at analyzing BBC’s discursive strategies used in its media coverage of Palestine during the last month of the October 7 war, drawing on Fairclough’s social theory of discourse and Van Dijk’s theory of ideology. Adopting a descriptive-analytical methodology, the study utilizes Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to investigate how language, discourse, and ideology intersect in shaping news narratives. To achieve this, the study integrates two complementary frameworks. Fairclough’s three-dimensional model facilitates the analysis of discourse through the interplay of textual features, discursive practices, and social context, elucidating how meaning is produced and power relations are reproduced. Van Dijk’s approach focuses on uncovering ideological structures by examining cognitive schemas—particularly the “us/them” dichotomy—and their linguistic and discursive manifestations that shape collective perception and dominance relations. The study corpus consists of a purposive, non-probability sample of ten BBC articles published on its official website between September 9 and October 9, 2025, covering the month prior to the announcement of the Trump Plan. The analysis of linguistic, discursive, ideological, and cognitive units reveals that BBC coverage reframes the October 7 war within a humanitarian–relief framework detached from its historical and political context, presenting suffering as a manageable humanitarian crisis. Linguistic and discursive choices tend to downplay the responsibility of the Israelis, while questioning Palestinian sources and foregrounding the Israeli actor through defensive and humanitarian narratives. At the ideological and cognitive levels, Palestinian political and historical rights are transformed into humanitarian needs, and a collective perception is constructed that portrays the conflict as a crisis between two equivalent parties to be addressed through administrative solutions, thereby contributing to the reproduction of existing power asymmetries without ending the Israeli Occupation. Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, Ideological Square, October 7, Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Model.