Date of Award

7-9-2026

Thesis Type

PhD

Document Type

Thesis

Divisions

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Department

Department of Media and Communication Studies

Institution

Universiti Malaya

Abstract

This study critically examines the intersection of media, politics, and power discourse in Pakistan, focusing on the media's role in shaping public opinion and political narratives during election campaigns. The study leverages Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) to investigate how political elites in Pakistan utilise multimodal semiotic resources to construct, reinforce, and sustain socio-political power structures that strengthen the status quo. In today's fast-changing media environment, election campaigns serve as a key battleground where sophisticated political narratives are engineered to shape public debate and reinforce dominant ideologies. Grounded in a critical paradigm, this analysis examines how the discursive processes of multimodal media production and consumption perpetuate dominant narratives that shape discourses and ideologies, thereby privileging elites and maintaining the existing social order. Drawing on social semiotics and critical discourse theories, the study employs MCDA to reveal how, through semiotic choices, representation strategies, classification of social actors and their actions through symbols, rhetorical tropes, visual framing, and strategic language, multimodal texts converge to create persuasive discourses. The findings of this study demonstrate that, under the guise of democratic rights and communication practices in modern-day election campaigns, a sophisticated multimodal discursive framework is employed to idealise the political leadership persona, thereby legitimising their power. This process often fabricates a dualistic narrative that first magnifies a social and political crisis and then strategically positions the leaders as the sole heroic saviours. Through a synergistic orchestration of verbal, visual, and auditory semiotic choices, political leaders are imbued with augmented and magnified moral and emotional virtues, such as patriotism, resilience, and moral uprightness, through strategic techniques like nomination, predication, and perspectivization. This leadership persona is reinforced through strategic argumentation that leverages logos, ethos, and pathos, alongside semiotic cues such as visual cues, camera angles, framing, and symbolic alignments with national and religious identity. Ultimately, this curated narrative, asserted with a mix of epistemic modalities, aims to distract from institutional failures, manufacture democratic consent, and strengthen the leader's long-term political legitimacy, thereby perpetuating the ideological dominance of the existing power structure. Finally, this study fills a critical gap in the literature by extending critical multimodal analysis beyond linguistic frames to a broader set of media practices that influence political attitudes and reinforce ideological constructs, thereby contributing to the field of political communication and the construction of political discourses by offering a nuanced understanding of how media can function as both a tool of social control and a battleground for ideological dominance. Furthermore, the findings have implications for policy, political communication literacy, media regulation, and public discourse, particularly in contexts like Pakistan, where democratic processes are already fragile and susceptible to manipulation by powerful actors. This dissertation, therefore, not only contributes to and advances theoretical perspectives on media and power in political communication but also underscores the ethical imperatives for media literacy and regulatory frameworks that promote transparency and resist media-driven hegemony in politically volatile regions.

Initial

khm

Additional Information

Thesis (PhD) – Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya, 2026.

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