RUSSIAN INTERVENTION IN SYRIAN POLITICAL TURMOIL: MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF SELECTED POLITICAL CARTOONS PUBLISHED ON AMERICAN AND ARAB DIGITAL MEDIA

Abstract

During the past few years, the caricatures genre has gained substantial research interest across disciplines such as communication media studies and health sciences.  The reason for this preference can be attributed to the quality of cartoons to serve as a forceful source of data used in the study of social phenomena. This paper aims to illustrate how political cartoons in American and Arab-Muslim Digital Media are used as a vehicle for promoting a political agenda regarding Russian involvement in Syrian political choices, and to reorient and shape public opinion through recurrent depictions that mirror current socio-political issues at a given period. The study aims to scrutinise political cartoons in the light of the research question: how are the political cartoons presented in American media used to set the socio-political agenda regarding Russian intervention in the current Syrian political turmoil? For this purpose, five cartoons each were selected from the websites www.usnews.com and www.aljazeera.com, based on purposive sampling. Ruth Wodak’s Discourse Historical Analysis is a functional theoretical approach as it provides elements for analysing both text and images. Moreover, discursive strategies were revealed at both macro (constructive, perpetuating, transformational, and destructive) and micro (referential, predicational, argumentation, perspectivation, and framing) levels, along with their linguistic realisations. The study’s findings present and expose the underlying assumptions and ideological foundations of the caricatures developed.