REPRESENTATION OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES: A MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL CARTOONS PUBLISHED IN PAKISTANI ENGLISH NEWSPAPER DAWN

Abstract

The present study focuses on the representation of political ideologies through political cartoons in the Pakistani English newspaper "Dawn". According to this research, ideology-laden media discourses significantly influence structuring or restructuring our perceptions of social and political reality. This research aims to uncover the hidden purpose of print media through multimodal analysis of selected political cartoons. The linguistics and non-linguistic (graphics) devices utilized by the cartoonist can alter and influence the readers' thoughts. The data was collected from the Dawn newspaper from 1 September 2020 to 31 October, 2020. Furthermore, the researcher used Machin's (2007) theoretical framework of multimodal analysis to analyze the selected cartoons qualitatively. The following factors were used to evaluate each cartoon: Participants, setting, written caption, pose, and objects. The study discovered the cartoonist used visual language to communicate his sociopolitical views in order to influence readers' perspectives. Furthermore, the print media criticize political parties whose policies are not in the best interests of the people. The present study revealed that English national newspaper uses cartoonist representation to reflect social and political issues such as FATF-related issues, long March of opposition, Corruption, inflation, Federal Board of Revenue etc.