Constructing Extremism: A Comparative Analysis of News Discourse in “The Guardian” and “The Telegraph”

This paper examines the different ways in which The Guardian and The Telegraph, two prominent and ideologically opposed UK newspapers, represent the construct of extremism in recent news narratives. Combining corpus linguistics and multimodal critical discourse analysis, the study explores ideological biases in framing extremism, particularly in relation to current socio-political debates. An initial analysis of collocates and visual representations indicates that The Guardian tends to associate extremism with far-right political movements, while critiquing the UK government’s expanded definition of extremism as a restriction on the freedom of speech. Conversely, The Telegraph links extremism primarily with perceived terrorist threats and highlights “left-wing extremism”, adopting a more security-focused narrative. The findings from the study are the first step in understanding how media framing of extremism could exacerbate the existing polarity in public opinion regarding the Hamas-Israeli war, while shaping perceptions of what is acceptable (or not) as political activism and what constitutes a social threat.