Philippine E-Journals

“Terorista! Terorista?”: Ideological construction of the Moro Muslim identity in the online reports on the Mamasapano clash and Bangsamoro Basic Law

Amiel Jansen Demetrial

Discipline: Media Discourse Studies

 

Abstract:

The main objective of this study is to find out how the online media constructed and legitimized a general ideology about the Moro Muslim people in the news articles released about the Mamasapano clash and Bangsamoro Basic Law. This study employed textual analysis and CDA as designed by Fairclough to analyze the texts of the news stories published in inquirer.net and philstar.com, the two mostvisited online news agencies, through four methods of textual analysis: analysis of lexicalization, analysis of thematization, analysis of transitivity, and agency analysis. The study revealed that the common ideologies adapted by the online media about the Moro Muslim people’s identity involved the homogeneity of the attitude of the Moro Muslim people, violence, terrorism, and rebelliousness. In the same vein, the media still use political figures as sources in their news articles to legitimize ideologies about the Moro Muslim people which implies that “common sense assumptions” about the Moro Muslim Filipinos that have existed since the age of Spanish colonization still persist to exist in the modern society and are still used by news agencies to sensationalize their content despite the efforts of the said group to make peace with the Philippine government.