Press portrayals of Saudi Women’s empowerment in the context of military enlistment

Abstract

AbstractMedia representations are susceptible to attitudes. This study examined how the press frames the attitudes of Western, non-Western, and Saudi newspapers towards employing Saudi women in the military, a topic which has formed a rich area of interest for the press between 2018 and 2023. To that end, a corpus comprising 29 articles (10,288 words) from both local and international publications was compiled, with the purpose of conducting critical discourse analysis. The study analysed corpus concordances both quantitatively and qualitatively seeking to identify attitudes generated through language and discourse, either implicitly or explicitly. Following Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach, the study identified keywords and co-occurrent patterns. It was found that news articles could be classified into three patterns of their representation of Saudi women empowerment: advocating, biased and neutral. This study offers a reflection on how the linguistic features of newspapers frame females and address female issues on diverse grounds.