Abstract
Media coverage of militancy in Swat valley, Pakistan, promotes the use of militarization as the “only” means to dismantle the Taliban, ignoring the local civil society and its struggle for change. As journalists and participant observers in this struggle, we examine the portrayal of Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, in two leading English dailies, The New York Times of the U.S., and daily Dawn of Pakistan. We explore how was Malala’s struggle for women education in Swat reflected in the editorial text of the two dailies and how did this coverage relate to the overall civil society movement against militancy in Swat? Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study finds that both the newspapers make a strong case for militarization and associate Swat with the Taliban only, thus making invisible the role of the local anti-Taliban struggle. We argue that the way media pick a few successful people to present them out of context as role models for others to follow, have significant consequences in areas of militarized imperialist conflicts, where resistance to organized violence, be it state-sponsored or by the Taliban, is rooted in communal traditions and collective approaches
Syed Irfan Ashraf, Faizullah Jan,. (2018) Militarizing Malala: Global Media and Local Struggle, The Dialogue, Volume 13, Issue 4.
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