Are Japanese school history textbooks distorting History?

A Critical Analysis to uncover embedded ideologies within two media texts

Abstract

Media outlets around the world are social institutions that present discourse from a particular society. These discourses are stories written by journalists representing their viewpoints and values, which are influenced by particular ideologies from their own society. To help understand and try to uncover ideologies embedded within media discourse, a critical discourse analysis (hereafter known as CDA) can be used to analyse the use of vocabulary and grammar, but within the social context that they are written in. This paper uses a CDA to investigate how two different media outlets report the controversies surrounding Japanese history textbooks and their portrayal of the events from World War II. The first two sections will establish the theories of CDA before the analysis of the two media texts is carried out using Fairclough's framework for CDA (1995, 2001).