'The Opinion and the Counter Opinion': News Framing and Double Voicing on Al Jazeera English

The chapter focusses on the English-language website of the Al Jazeera Arab network, comparing its web-mediated news reporting style to that of CNN and the BBC International, two global media giants. Such a comparison mainly investigates how criteria of newsworthiness are respectively foregrounded by synergic semiotic resources and discursive strategies on the three websites. The analysis aims to elicit a better understanding of the cultural specificities the Arab network exploits in order to establish a recognisable brand identity. To this purpose, the investigation of sample coverage of the Iraq war across the three websites would seem to prove Al Jazeera's greater degree of heteroglossic involvement than its Western counterpart and its potentially transformative role in the shaping of global news flows from the East to the West.