An Investigation into Texture, Power and Ideology in Electronic News Articles Mohammad Awad AlAfnan* Liberal Arts Department, American University of the Middle East, Eqilah, Kuwait Corresponding Author: Mohammad Awad AlAfnan, E-mail: mohammad.al-afnan@aum.edu.kw ABSTRACT It is widely believed that media texts are shaped by the wider social and cultural structures. Therefore, attaining a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of media reporting entails complete understanding of the social artifacts and the cultural structures. Using Critical Discourse Analysis and Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) models of cohesion, this study examines texture, power and ideology in an electronic news article. The analysis looked into the context to comprehensively examine the text. The analysis revealed that referencing and lexical cohesion are the writer’s preferred model of cohesion throughout the text. It is also apparent that substitution and ellipsis are unexpectedly popular, which refect a speech-like style. The critical analysis reveals that the article has hidden ideological meanings and is being divided along some ideological lines to refect the views of those whose interest is being served and those whose interest is being undermined. The writer used foregrounding and lexis to serve his ideology, and backgrounding and sometimes omission to undermine the ideologies of the ‘other’. Key words: Texture, Power, Ideology, Electronic News Articles, Critical Discourse Analysis INTRODUCTION Language in use is the main goal of conducting discourse analysis. Throughout the years, linguists developed several approaches to tackle spoken and written discourse. Halliday and Hasan (1976), for instance, developed the functional grammar approach, in which they focused on the linguis- tic structures of texts. They viewed language as a system of meanings accompanied by forms by which the meaning can be expressed. They focused on aspects that make a text meaningful and coherent. Recent years, however, brought a shift in linguists’ interest from the linguistic structure of texts to how texts fgure in the social process. Language is no longer seen as a refection of reality, but as creating re- ality. Power abuse, dominance, inequality and bias, on the one hand, and how these sources are initiated, maintained, reproduced and transformed within a specifc social, eco- nomic, political and historical contexts (Dijk, 1988), on the other, become a vital part in analyzing discourse. This new approach is called Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). CDA was applied in several types of discourse, and media is one them. This study rigorously examines the relationship be- tween the discursive practices and texts, on the one hand, and the wider social and cultural structures, on the other. In other words, this study investigate how texts “arise out of and are ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles over power” (Fairclough 1995, p. 132). The use of CDA in investigation media reporting is not a new practice. McGregor (2003), for example, studied how news reports Published by Australian International Academic Centre PTY.LTD. Copyright (c) the author(s). This is an open access article under CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.8n.5p.77 serve the dominant power; Kress (1990), on the other hand, studied how journalists adopt the ideological discursive structure to serve a particular system. Using an article published in the Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER), “The UN has Failed Burma”, this study examines power, ideology, and the textual artifacts of the text. In order to analyze the cohesive relations in the text, Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) principles – referencing, sub- stitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion- will be applied. CDA will be used to determine the ideological pos- tures and power relations. At the beginning, it will be useful to start with the grounding of the text. CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS Van Dijk (1998) viewed critical discourse analysis as a feld that studies and analyses written and spoken texts in social, cultural, historical or political contexts in order to highlight discursive features such as dominance, ideology, power, bias, and inequality. Fairclough (1993, p. 135) defnes critical dis- course analysis as “discourse analysis which aims to system- atically explore often opaque relationships of causality and determination between (a) discursive practices, events and texts, and (b) wider social and cultural structures, relations and processes; to investigate how such practices, events and texts arise out of and are ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles over power; and to explore how the opacity of these relationships between discourse and society is itself a factor securing power and hegemony.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature E-ISSN: 2200-3452 & P-ISSN: 2200-3592 www.ijalel.aiac.org.au ARTICLE INFO Article history Received: July 07, 2019 Accepted: August 27, 2019 Published: September 30, 2019 Volume: 8 Issue: 5 Advance access: September 2019 Conficts of interest: None Funding: None