“More Bad News”: Gossip, Scandalization, and Deception in Algerian Online Foreign-Affairs Hard News

Abstract

This article examines gossip, scandalization, and deception in Algerian online foreign-affairs hard news. Conceptualized within Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), it addresses a gap in existing research: while foreign-policy media discourse has been studied through framing, propaganda, and ideology, far less attention has been paid to how gossip migrates into the hard-news genre of foreign-affairs reporting. Grounded in a three-year longitudinal investigation forming part of a broader doctoral thesis on disinformation discourse in Algerian online news, the study argues that routine hard-news practices in two major Algerian online outlets — Algeria Press Service (APS) and Radio Algérienne — produce systematically biased, gossip-laden accounts of international events, falling short of media-ethics standards of accuracy, balance, and source fidelity. Drawing on an integrated framework of Critical Discourse Studies, Critical Linguistics, Systemic Functional Linguistics, and the concept of gossip, and applying Richardson’s (2007) model of newspaper discourse analysis at micro-, meso-, and macro-analytical levels, the study analyses three representative articles covering two foreign-affairs dossiers: the Iran–Israel–United States military confrontation (two APS articles) and Morocco–Israel bilateral relations (one Radio Algérienne article). A forensic-linguistic verification procedure compares the outlets’ quotations against independent institutional records — including UN statements, IAEA reports, and U.S. governmental communiqués — to establish where sources are recontextualized or distorted, and to construct the historical archive that enables a Foucauldian genealogical engagement with Algerian foreign-affairs discourse. The analysis demonstrates that evaluative language is systematically mobilized to transform diplomatic events into moralized narratives of betrayal, conspiracy, and aggression. In the APS articles, gossip surfaces through negative naming, the scandal frame, and a forensically documented quotation-integrity violation in which an ideologically loaded expression is interpolated into António Guterres’s UN statement — words absent from the original source text. In the Radio Algérienne article, gossip is realized through transitivity and nominalization: action processes activate the Moroccan state as an agent of “repression” and “betrayal,” while nominalized forms condense political choices into morally marked categories. In the Iran–Israel–United States case, gossip converges with the discourse-historical construction of an enemy image (Feindbild), in which a complex geopolitical configuration is personified into a single, blameworthy actor organized around a Manichean division between the innocent and the guilty. At the macro level, the study argues that these practices are organized by an institutional order of discourse — a Foucauldian dispositif discursif — that governs who may speak, what may be said, and which meanings are privileged as legitimate. This order exhibits deep political parallelism between government and media. The study further identifies an internal contradiction within this order of discourse on the Moroccan Sahara issue, where two presidential statements — one adopting a cautious, UN-deferential register, the other dismissing the Moroccan autonomy plan as a French-born myth (kharafa) — reveal a hegemonic instability that, read through Fairclough’s (1992) theory of discourse change, signals the potential for future discursive realignment under structural diplomatic pressure, including UN Security Council Resolution 2797 (2025). Theoretically, the study makes three contributions. First, it extends gossip as an analytical concept beyond celebrity and tabloid culture into the hard-news genre of foreign-affairs reporting, operationalizing it through three co-occurring criteria: absent-third-party orientation, reputational-moral evaluation, and community-building. Second, it provides forensic-linguistic evidence that deceptive source recontextualization constitutes a structural feature of the Algerian government–media nexus, not an isolated journalistic lapse. Third, it applies Fairclough’s (1992) social theory of discourse change to project the conditions under which an ideologically overdetermined order of discourse may undergo hegemonic realignment. The article concludes that Algerian foreign-affairs coverage functions as “bad news” in a double sense: it reports crisis while simultaneously enacting bad professional practices — gossip, scandalization, and deceptive source recontextualization — that fall short of media-ethics standards and distinguish reporting from propaganda.