THE REPRESENTATION OF ZAKIR NAIK IN “AL JAZEERA” AND “THE INDEPENDENT”

Abstract

This research critically examines the way Zakir Naik is represented in Al Jazeera from Qatar and the The Independent from United Kingdom. There were many kinds of accusation attacking Zakir Naik related with religious hatred speech, citizenship, and ownership of personal TV issue. Those accusations made him banned in some countries. Based on the postulates of Critical Discourse Analysis and Machin & Leeuwen’s (2007) model for other representation of social actor, this article presents an analysis of the otherness representation of Zakir Naik. Eight news articles were analyzed in order to demonstrate lexical choices that construct positive and negative-otherness representation of social actor. The findings showed that both media showed positive and negative representation in a different way. There are also underlying factors of the Multidimensional Representation of Zakir Naik from two media which shows cultural proximity and religious heterogeneity.

Keywords

• critical discourse analysis
• news recontextualization
• positive representation
• negative representation