Media portrayal of hackers inChina DailyandThe New York Times: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis

Abstract

This study draws on a synergy of Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies to scrutinize the portrayal of hackers in China Daily and The New York Times in the 21st century (2001–2020), primarily revolving around the main social actors and targets in hacking. This study demonstrates that both media share a positive transformation of the image-building of hackers in the 21st century. Besides, countries are salient social actors in hacker media discourse and the two media differ in their ways of constructing them. The New York Times tends to have a negative other-representation and categorical otherness of specific countries through such discursive strategies as negative other-representation and group categorization, whereas China Daily is prone to insist on opposing the US hacking allegations in a defensive manner. Regarding major targets, China Daily highlights government websites whereas The New York Times emphasizes government websites, officials’ emails, large technology companies, and election infrastructure. The analysis shows that the two media’s different ways of framing hackers are underpinned by the ideologies behind them and the Chinese and US socio-political landscapes. This study can provide insights into how hacker discourse in media is represented in the 21st century and how national identities are constructed in the media representations of hackers.

A corpus-based interpretation of the discourse–cognitive–society triangle on Chinese court judgments

“…CL helps the interpretations to be more trustworthy (Subtirelu and Baker, 2018), which runs against subjectivity and over-generalization (Hart and Cap, 2014). The integration of CL and CDA can be traced back to the 1990s (Subtirelu and Baker, 2018), which has been extensively utilized to approach the discourse of law (Wu and Sun, 2019;Zhao et al, 2021;Cheng and Machin, 2022), media (van Dijk, 2021;Pei et al, 2022). This paper conducts the socio-cognitive discourse analysis, and the corpora in the present study contain 1.74 million words, randomly selected from China Court Network 1 ).…”

Intertextuality and ideology: Social actor’s representation in handling of COVID-19 from China daily

“…Recapping the literature, studies have examined how China Daily (hereinafter CD) plays a significant role in creating national identities and ideologies ( Li, 2020 ; Lihua, 2009 ), what topics appeared in combatting the pandemic via CD ( Yuan et al, 2022 ) and how it portrays certain issues (e.g., hackers) in CD ( Pei et al, 2022 ). However, there is little research attention on the actors, actants, and voices commonly portrayed and why so.…”

“…However, there is little research attention on the actors, actants, and voices commonly portrayed and why so. CD’s portrayal of COVID-19 social actors is important because it is a major agenda-setter in the Chinese media system ( Duan and Takahashi, 2017 ; Pei et al, 2022 ), serving as the English version of The People’s Daily, the defacto “official mouthpiece” of the Chinese Communist Party, conveying the government’s attitudes and positions ( Lihua, 2009 ). CD is widely read in over 200 countries and areas outside China with an average daily circulation of 600,000 worldwide and 300,000 domestically.…”