Even though more than half a century has passed since the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) emerged, many people still have an interest in CSR. According to a survey, eighty-seven percent of American consumers said they would purchase a product produced by a corporation that supported at least one specific social issue. Also, more than three-quarters (76%) would refuse to buy a product if they found out the company endorsed the issue contrary to their beliefs. These numbers align with consumers’ intent to purchase or boycott based on CSR commitment. Do CSR activities affect sales? Many studies have been conducted to answer this question in the academic field, but the results have not been consistent. Some articles reported that CSR activities positively impact the firm’s various aspects, including financial performance. But other studies reported that the impact of CSR on firms’ performance is unclear or even harmful.
This article explores how the conflicting ideological positions of the news media in two different countries are reflected in their perceptions of the postwar situation in Iraq and become encoded in lexical choices and strategies in relation to the cognitive and socio-political dimension of the media. The target data were collected from the on-line news reports posted on the respective web sites of the two networks: the Fox News Channel in the U.S. (foxnews.com) and the English-language version of Al-Jazeera in Qatar (english.aljazeera.net). This study adopts an interdisciplinary theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis for ideological representations in news discourse by integrating labeling strategies in information structure from critical discourse scholars (Tomlin et al. 1997; Fairclough 1992, 1995). In particular, the lexical choices and their cognitive and discursive strategies are qualitatively and quantitatively examined by focusing on the labels on the War against Iraq and postwar Iraq. As a result, this study seeks to verify the idea that the ideological differences between the two news networks result in their own strategically and informationally structured labels on Iraqi situations in each news text, keeping and reproducing the separating concept of Self and Other according to each network's socio-cultural identity and ideology.