A Meaning-Making in Conflict Narratives: Analysis Interpersonal, Ideational, and Textual Metafunctions in CNN’s Russia-Ukraine Reports

Abstract

This study is motivated by academic concerns about how global news media grammatically construct public understanding of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, especially when reporting is widely perceived as objective, but rarely examined at the clause level. Using on Systemic Functional Linguistics as developed by Halliday and Matthiessen (2014), the research aims to investigate how intepersonal meaning (mood and modality), ideational meaning (transitivity), and textual meaning (theme-rheme) are realized in CNN live news reports on the Russia-Ukraine war. The data consist of 10 CNN news excerpts broadcast between January and February 2023, segmented into 105 clauses and analyzed qualitatively using SFL metafunctional for process types, mood structures, modality expressions, and theme types. The findings show a strong dominance of material processes (61.90%), fully declarative mood (100%) with very limited modality (5.71%), and overwhelmingly topical themes (97.14%), indicating that CNN’s war reporting foregrounds concrete actions and official actors, presents information as factual and unproblematic, and organizes messages so that states and institutions remain discursively prominent. These patterns suggest that grammatical choices systematically support an authoritative, action-centered representation of the conflict, with limited space for ambiguity, evaluation, or alternative perspectives grounded in grammatical variation.