PERSUASIVE AND MANIPULATIVE LANGUAGE IN POLITICAL WAR NEWS HEADLINES: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Headlines carry a weight out of all proportion to their length: they are read first, remembered longest, and often stand in for the article beneath them. This study asks how persuasive and manipulative language works in political war news headlines, and where the line between the two actually falls. Working within critical discourse analysis, and drawing together Fairclough's three-dimensional model, van Dijk's ideological square, and Entman's framing theory, it examines the linguistic devices that allow a headline to carry an ideological charge while still reading as plain reporting. A recurring set of tools emerges: evaluative naming and labelling, euphemism and dysphemism, agent-deleting grammar such as passivization and nominalization, metaphor, and the pronouns and modal verbs that quietly mark an "us versus them" divide. What these devices share, and what makes them manipulative rather than merely persuasive, is that they pass off interpretive choices as neutral description, settling a conclusion in the reader's mind before the reader notices any choice was made. The article argues that the core problem is precisely this invisibility, sharpened by a methodological danger that discourse analysis may reproduce the very bias it sets out to expose. In response it proposes two remedies: critical language awareness for readers, and methodological triangulation, through corpus linguistics and reception testing, for analysts.