Ideological dissonances among Chinese-language newspapers in Hong Kong: A corpus-based analysis of reports on the Occupy Central Movement

Abstract

The Occupy Central Movement was the biggest protest in Hong Kong in decades and caused an unprecedented division of opinion in society. Reports about the event in local Chinese media were remarkably different in stance and attitude. To understand the ideological dissonances and their linguistic construction, this article analyzes a corpus of 120 reports on the Occupy Central Movement from four major Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong, namely, Apple Daily, Ming Pao, Oriental Daily News and Ta Kung Pao, which cover the political spectrum from anti-Beijing to pro-Beijing. In total, 856 concordance lines of the two selected words ‘佔中’ ( occupy Central) and ‘佔領’ ( occupy) were annotated using the Attitude framework. Analysis shows that their attitudes toward the event form a continuum from supportive, through neutral, to antipathic. The attitudes do not simply reflect the stances of the newspapers, but are strategically selected and designed to legitimize or delegitimize the event. The pattern of attitudes reflects the ideological divergence in Hong Kong society, and at the same time, the news reports also exacerbate the divergence by reinforcing the attitudes of their readers.

Engaging social media users with attitudinal messages during health crisis communication

“…In these cases, rather than directly telling the audience how to feel, the messages elicited attitudes implicitly, such as by representing events or people’s behaviors and actions. Such implicitness is in fact a preferred choice in news reporting as an attempt to reduce attitudinal responsibility and maintain objectivity ( Feng, 2017 , Martin and White, 2005 ). Nevertheless, as indicated by the other half of the attitudinal messages (n = 264, 48.4%), People’s Daily did not always shy away from being explicit in expressing attitude.…”

“…The Attitude system has been extensively applied in research concerning personal and institutional discourses to study how attitudinal meanings were designed, for example, to promote positive self-presentation ( Ho, 2020 ), build rapport and trust ( Ho, 2014 , Jensen, 2009 ), and legitimize or delegitimize political stances ( Feng, 2017 , Hoffmann, 2018 ). To understand the attitudes People’s Daily exhibited in its public communication during COVID-19, this study considers adopting the Attitude system for analysis.…”

Representations of the 2014 Hong Kong protests in journalistic translation: A corpus-based critical framing analysis of Chinese and English news coverage

“…Research on representations of the 2014 Hong Kong protests has examined specific aspects of the protests and how these events are framed in the local, national and global media (e.g. Du et al, 2018; Feng, 2017; Sparks, 2015). These studies focus on coverage of the protests in monolingual media, but their representations in transnational media have been ignored.…”

‘Enough is enough: this cycle of violence has to come to an end’: Practical reasoning in the editorials during the extradition bill crisis of Hong Kong

“…Several previous critical discourse analysis (CDA) studies have explored the role of the media in local political discourse from several perspectives. The most typical avenue has been to adopt a corpus-based approach in order to identify opposing ideologies as reflected in different mainstream news publications, for example, (Feng, 2017; Ho, 2019). Feng (2017), for instance, adopts Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal theory in his study, comparatively analyzing authorial attitudes across several major Chinese-language news media outlets encompassing an exceedingly diverse political spectrum.…”

“…The most typical avenue has been to adopt a corpus-based approach in order to identify opposing ideologies as reflected in different mainstream news publications, for example, (Feng, 2017; Ho, 2019). Feng (2017), for instance, adopts Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal theory in his study, comparatively analyzing authorial attitudes across several major Chinese-language news media outlets encompassing an exceedingly diverse political spectrum. Similarly, Ho (2018) adopts a lexical-based corpus approach in identifying opposing ideological authorial stances from two of the more prominent English news organizations, namely the South China Morning Post ( SCMP ), the largest English newspaper in Hong Kong, and the Beijing-backed China Daily .…”