NEWS MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF COVID-19 ARTICLES : A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF US AND CHINA NEWSPAPERS ON XENOPHOBIA & RACISM

• المؤلف الرئيسي: SUE JING, TEH
• التنسيق: Final Year Project Report
• اللغة: English
• منشور في: Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) 2020
• الموضوعات: P Philology. Linguistics
• الوصول للمادة أونلاين: http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/37071/1/TEH%20SUE%20JING.pdf; http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/37071/

Media representation research has been a crucial topic in the field of racism and xenophobia. Previous scholars discover that media representation plays an important role in shaping racist and xenophobic perception and stereotypes of Others and influence the readers with media’s power especially amidst of global pandemic of COVID-19. Nevertheless, most past studies focus on media representation of COVID-19 in general news articles, it is less known about the media representation of COVID-19 in racism and xenophobia related articles. Hence, this study aims to investigate the news media representation of COVID-19 in American and Chinese online newspapers to compare how COVID-19 are represented in xenophobia and racism articles with discovering the terminologies used to describe COVID-19, media frames on representing the news stories as well as the tone of the news articles. Content analysis in media will be utilized as the analytical framework. This study employs direct approach content analysis as an analytical tool with analytical categories which are terminologies of COVID-19, media framing, and tone of the news articles. A total of 36 articles were analyzed in this study, with 16 articles from The Washington Post and 20 articles from China Daily. The findings of the current study discover terminologies used for COVID-19 are mainly the official name coronavirus or COVID-19, but the U.S. media used terms such as ‘Wuhan virus’, ‘Chinese virus’ and ‘China virus’ to refer to the disease. Dominant frames of COVID-19 record the frame of attribution of responsibility, ethnicization, and human interest. The tone of articles is more positive on Chinese news media. Overall, Chinese news media represent COVID-19 in a more positive light compared to the U.S. media.