Re/semiotization, Discourse and Ideology: A Multimodal Analysis of the News Reporting of Kashmir Issue in Online News Gallery

Abstract

In online news media galleries, certain news stories are packed in a way that foregrounds a play on words and pictures. This forms an evaluative stance on the news-event being depicted and creates an opportunity to investigate the extent to which galleries exploit the semiotic potential of the web to re/shape stories in new ways. It is in this context, the present study aims to explore how semiotic elements are re/mediated through inter(tra)textual multimodal references and; how this re/semiotization is employed in manufacturing the certain brand of point of view in online news consumers. More specifically, it investigates the evaluative re/semiotization of the online news reporting of the Kashmir Issue of 5^th august 2019 in international media. The data of the news items (headlines,images) related to Kashmir Issue are collected from the online news galleries of the News Websites of the international scope (The Guardian, Foreign Policy and The New York Times), covering from  August 2019 to September 2019. For the analysis, it uses Multimodal Discourse Analysis (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996, 2001, 2006) as an analytical; while the concepts of Semiotic Remediation/Resemiotization of Iedema (2003, 2010) and Prior and Hengst (2010) as the theoretical framework. Using hermeneutic approach, the study has found the significant evidences of the ideological re/semiotization of the images and indications of the manipulative interplay of the word / image nexus.