The semiotics of visual and textual legitimacy in the 2014 Gaza war.

In this article I conduct a multimodal critical discourse analysis of news coverage of the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza by select British and South African print news outlets. The representation of the actors' legitimacy is the theoretical framework used for the study. Interviews were also conducted with journalists who reported on the war for insights into aspects of news production that impacted their reporting. Textually and visually Israeli military personnel were accorded legitimacy. The Palestinian perspective was marginalised in addition to being de-legitimated. A key facet of the war's coverage is the highly-structured reporting environment in Israel and Gaza. I argue that this continues to exert a significant impact on the work of journalists there. The article enhances current research on the analysis of multimodal texts using qualitative approaches. Important insights are provided about the manner in which textual and visual semiotic resources in news texts function in unison to convey or rescind legitimacy. The second contribution concerns the impact of the news production process in the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The media's role in legitimising Israeli violence is particularly pertinent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]