News Media Representation of the Dakota Access Pipeline Protest (A Study Using Systemic Functional Linguistics)

My dissertation presents a critical discourse analysis of news media reporting of three specific altercation events during the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protest in 2016. The DAPL Protest is known globally as a grassroots movement occurring in response to the construction of a 1,172-mile long pipeline across the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois. Initially led by members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, the DAPL protest movement centered on the concerns that tribal lands would be destroyed during construction and that the region’s water supply would be contaminated. Although the tribe’s protest of the project began in 2014, it was largely kept out of mainstream news media. It wasn’t until the fall of 2016, when reports of physical confrontations surfaced, that the ongoing protest made national headlines. While several studies have analyzed the quantitative patterns of this news coverage, only a few studies have taken a qualitative look at the actual content of the news reports. My project intends to fill this gap by examining how these altercation events and the actors involved are characterized by journalists and presented to the public. To do so, I draw on tools and methods of Critical Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistics, specifically Transitivity analysis and Appraisal Theory.