Conflicting national media positions are often reflected in the discursive patterns used in news headlines. Perhaps nowhere has this been clearer than in the recent contrasting reports of the Battle for Tripoli during the Libyan civil war of 2011. Using data collected from online articles in the British national daily newspaper The Guardian and the Chinese national daily newspaper The People’s Daily, Halliday’s transitivity analysis is deployed to analyze these patterns in the light of critical discourse studies. The results demonstrate how differences in the national contexts between these two newspapers are affirmed in the discursive choices of their news headlines. These results also highlight the concepts of positive self and negative other construed in accordance with the national positions of these two newspapers in the global structure of political power.