The News Coverage of Saudi Women Driving Restriction: A Comparative Analysis of Modality in Al-Jazirah News Reports of Restriction and Post Restriction Era

Compared to other Arab and Muslim country, Saudi Arabia is known for its culture and customs which biased towards men rather than women. Saudi women are restricted from
doing various things independently or without a male guardian. One of these restrictions imposed on Saudi women is car driving until the ban was lifted in 2018. Over the last twenty
years, there are a lot of struggles recorded by the mass media between the group demanding more rights for Saudi women and the conservative preserving the fundamental of Saudi's culture based on strict Islamic teaching. Hence, this paper examines the way modern standard Arabic online news of Al-Jazirah (AJ) of Saudi Arabia portrayed the restriction of car driving on Saudi women during both eras of the restriction of driving and during the time when the restriction has been lifted. This paper also aims to analyse the ways that language is exploited in AJ to report on struggles around the driving restriction on Saudi women, particularly in the used of modality as one of discourse construction strategy utilised by the news outlet. Therefore, the paper will compare the corpus data consisting of online news articles published by AJ between 2010 and 2014 which represent the restriction era (labelled as CD 01 subcorpus data), with the articles in 2018 (CD 02 sub-corpus data) when the ban has been lifted using corpus data mining software 'AntConc' for the Windows 11 system version 4.3.1 (2024). The quantitative result of corpus data then will be analysed using a qualitative approach based on the textual-oriented Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Fairclough and media discourse of Ruth Wodak. The result shows that AJ news outlet in the pre and post periods has a significant difference around the news discourse in the use of modal adverbs portraying the restriction of driving on Saudi women.