Keep Silent, Keep Sinful: Mainstream Newspapers’ Representation of Gay Men and Lesbians in Contemporary China

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiang Chang ◽  
Hailong Ren

From a critical discourse analysis of all gay-related news reports in five mainstream Beijing newspapers between 2010 and 2015, this article distils four dominant categories of images of gays and lesbians represented by the news media: gays as crime victims because of their presumed inherent weakness, as violent subjects, as enemies of traditional values and as a source of social instability. This means that despite legal and official recognition of homosexuality in China, it is still tainted with sin and perversion in the mainstream public discourse. The way in which the Chinese news media and journalists construct the image of the homosexual person notably differs from that in the West. Newspapers treat gay men and lesbians separately, with the former deemed socially destabilising elements of violence and promiscuity and the latter seen as closer to ‘normal’ heterosexuals in the way they think and act. In addition, Chinese news reports almost completely silence gay people who are rarely interviewed, and the few who are see only their expressions of shame or regret published. This article discusses and interprets such discursive strategies within the specific sociocultural context of Chinese society.

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yating Yu ◽  
Mark Nartey

Although the Chinese media’s construction of unmarried citizens as ‘leftover’ has incited much controversy, little research attention has been given to the ways ‘leftover men’ are represented in discourse. To fill this gap, this study performs a critical discourse analysis of 65 English language news reports in Chinese media to investigate the predominant gendered discourses underlying representations of leftover men and the discursive strategies used to construct their identities. The findings show that the media perpetuate a myth of ‘protest masculinity’ by suggesting that poor, single men may become a threat to social harmony due to the shortage of marriageable women in China. Leftover men are represented as poor men, troublemakers and victims via discursive processes that include referential, predicational and aggregation strategies as well as metaphor. This study sheds light on the issues and concerns of a marginalised group whose predicament has not been given much attention in the literature.


Author(s):  
Vladimir Cotal San Martin ◽  
David Machin

Abstract In the Swedish news-media we find sporadic critical, or reflective, reporting on the production conditions of Swedish ‘sweat-shop’ factories in the Global South, used to supply Transnational Corporations (TNCs). In this paper we carry out a critical discourse analysis, in particular using Van Leeuwen’s social actor and social action analysis, to look at examples from a larger corpus of 88 news reports and editorials from the Swedish press, between 2012–2017, which report and comment on activities of the Swedish company H&M in relation to its production chains. Analysis reveals how these recontextualize events, processes and motives, to represent Sweden and Swedish TNCs as characterized by a benevolent, democratic, humane, form of capitalism, drawing on discourses of a former social democratic Sweden of the 1960s before it became highly neo-liberalized. This nationalism converges with other discourses promoting the exploitation of the Global South.


2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 207-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Otto Santa Ana ◽  
Sandra L. Treviño ◽  
Michael J. Bailey ◽  
Kristen Bodossian ◽  
Antonio de Necochea

AbstractWe examine mainstream U.S. print news depictions of the 2006 immigration policy debate. Using critical discourse analysis informed by cognitive metaphor theory, we analyze a substantial sample of mainstream U.S. print news reports in May 2006, at the height of national attention on the “Great May Day” demonstrations across the country. We compare it to a second sample of print news media articles from October 2006, at the time of the passage of the 2006 Secure Fence Act. Mainstream print media represented immigrants with a noteworthy balance between human and nonhuman language during the time of the Great May Day marches. However, the media did not sustain a balanced representation of immigrants in the ensuing months. The conceptual metaphor immigrant as criminal is predominant during both periods. We explore the implication of the language used to frame the immigration policy debate.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 519-541
Author(s):  
Innocent Chiluwa

This study analyses news reports of public reactions to the controversial legislators’ monthly/annual income in Nigeria in 2019, which was presumed to far exceed the salaries of legislators worldwide. Data for this study are news and opinion articles published between 2017 and 2019 that represent public response to the salary scandal involving public officers and National Assembly members. Critical discourse analysis is adopted in the analyses of media representations of the main actors in and situations of the scandal. Hence, discursive strategies identified in the resistance discourse of the news media are qualitatively analysed. The study argues that lack of accountability and widespread corruption in the Nigerian political economy is a reflection of weak political institutions, such as those that empower legislators to enrich themselves.


2021 ◽  
pp. 016344372110455
Author(s):  
Mark Nartey

In recent years, LGBT issues have received substantial media attention and engendered heated public debate in Ghana. This paper analyzes the prejudiced construction of LGBT issues in the Ghanaian news media and how this contributes to a discriminatory discourse that demeans LGBT people and puts them at the periphery of Ghanaian society. The study employs a critical discourse analysis framework and a dataset of 385 articles, comprising news reports, op-ed pieces, and editorials. The analysis reveals that news content on LGBT issues is biased and inflammatory, and it frames LGBT people as expendables and undesirables. This is realized by exploiting three discourses, or forms of othering, that culminate into the (re)production and naturalization of moral panic: a discourse of amorality/immorality and societal destruction, a discourse of alienization, and a discourse of medicalization or pathologization. The paper concludes with a call for a more balanced and ethically/socially responsible news reporting, especially since LGBT issues in Ghana hold implications for national cohesion and security.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yulia Anggraeni ◽  
Elvi Citraresmana ◽  
Eko Wahyu Koeshandoyo

There is a scarcity of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) studies on the representation of social actors in news media, thus this study addressed this research gap by analysing the way news represented the French President Emmanuel Macron, regarding his controversial support of Samuel Paty, a history teacher in France who was murdered because he showed a cartoon of Prophet Muhammad in his class. This research aims to see the representation of Emmanuel Macron from the perspective of the French media, The Connexion France, which published their news in English language online to reach world-wide audience.  Four articles of the news were purposively selected for this CDA study, which were published from October 18 until November 1, 2020. The French President’s representation was analysed with the nomination and predication strategies.  Results showed that the Connexion France uses four nomination strategies to refer Emmanuel Macron. The professional anthroponyms refer to Emmanual Macron as “the President”, proper names as “Emmanuel Macron” to be the centre of the discourse, synecdoche as “Emmanuel Macron”, and deixis as “he” to avoid repetition the subject of the text. Two predication strategies were also used, the explicit predicate of how the President “has promised” action against Islamists and presupposition from the way the news linked pictures of boycotted French supermarket products with the President. This research provides a take on fresh news with CDA and can beneficial for the students who learn English language by showing how the media uses language for political figures.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 62-69
Author(s):  
Gideon Abioye Oyedeji ◽  
◽  
Nabila Idoko Idris ◽  

The incessant xenophobic attacks of Nigerians and other foreign nationals in South Africa have generated a unique discourse in the Nigerian media and in fact, other mainstream media on the African continent and international scene. These attacks are viewed by the international community as incompatible with 21st century civility. This paper therefore, engages the reports of selected news media in Nigeria, South African and other media houses with a view to explicating the ideologies that underpin each report seeing through the insight of Van Dijk, Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak’s models of Critical Discourse Analysis. A total of 10 report on the 2015-2019 xenophobia were purposively selected from the online outlets of these media houses. The study therefore found that the use of language by the Nigerian media shows that the polarisation tilted towards emphasising the positive ‘in-group’ description of the heinous acts visited on innocent Nigerians in South Africa whereas the South African and other news media brought to perspective the negative ‘out-group’ description of “some” Nigerians who are engaged in illegal businesses in their South Africa. The lexical choices contribute in significant ways to show the ideologies each reporters represent. The study submits that, these attacks by South Africans on fellow African Nationals are nefarious, iniquitous, atrocious and roguish perhaps because of their colonial experience.


Sociologija ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 612-630
Author(s):  
Marija Manasijevic

When observing the relation between the standard language and language variety, the hegemony of standards which implies the ideological foundation of its prestige cannot be discarded. Respecting the language standards, one shows his or her own social status in a certain way, being able to accommodate to the rules of public discourse regardless of the part of the country he or she comes from. A person can position themselves on the social ladder of power and prestige by using the ?pure? language in formal situations. The underlying problem of this paper is discourse analysis of the language used by the people from the South of Serbia in the TV show ?Porodicno blago? which has been conducted in accordance with the principles of the critical discourse analysis. The selected examples have been analyzed on three levels: text, discursive practice and social practice. According to the analyzed discourse examples we can infer that there are two basic ways of portraying the people from the South of Serbia. The first type is represented by the character of Tika Spic, who is the personification of a primitive, uneducated, resourceful and unscrupulous man. In contrast to that, the second type is naive, openhearted, primitive, passionate and hedonistic. The thing in common for both types of southerners is honouring the traditional values, which includes patriarchy connected to the lack of education, frugality and incivility in the broadest sense of the term. This paper discusses the ways of relativisation of these stereotypes by the means of the principles of sociolinguistic activism.


Journalism ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 146488492097810
Author(s):  
Tali Aharoni ◽  
Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt ◽  
Christian Baden ◽  
Maximilian Overbeck

This paper explores the dynamics of (dis)trust among experts, journalists, and audiences through the case study of an inaccurate exit poll aired on a leading Israeli television channel. It combines empirical data from the Israeli April 2019 elections with a conceptual view of exit polls as both sources of information and national rituals to address public discourse on the polls and its underlying suspicions. A multi-method approach yielded a corpus consisting of focus groups with citizens, in-depth semi-structured interviews with journalists, pollsters and experts, and qualitative textual analysis of news reports. Using inductive-qualitative analysis, we identified three types of public narratives, each casting blame for the erroneous exit poll projection on a different type of actor. The statistical and biased-media narratives tally with declining trust in the news media and assume misbehavior by pollsters and news creators respectively. The deception narrative, on the other hand, suggests that right-wing voters systematically sabotaged the exit poll projections. By extending trust beyond journalistic information, this narrative foregrounds the cultural meaning of election night rituals. Taken together, the narratives found in this study delineate (dis)trust as an interplay of active participants in the creation, reception, and interpretation of news. Our findings thus touch upon key attitudes towards both media and democracy and have implications for further studies on collective rituals and information evaluations in an era of eroding trust.


2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 243-252
Author(s):  
Zehui Dai

This article highlights the relationships among Chinese society, the discourse about doulas and doula care in childbirth, and Chinese women. The author used a critical feminist lens to analyze the discourse about doulas, doula care in childbirth, and women in Chinese mainstream news media. This analysis showed that the Chinese news media and government encouraged and promoted becoming a doula as a profession and doula care in labor in terms of cultural, social, and political factors. An argument was presented that these discourses obscure a nuanced understanding of Chinese women’s maternal health in general.


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