英文摘要 |
In late 2019, an outbreak broke out in Wuhan, China, and quickly swept the world. The pandemic posed an enormous challenge to China's national image, forcing the country to reshape its image through mechanisms of transnational media influence. Prior studies show that Malaysia's media is one of the targets of China's influence. However, these studies have focused primarily on the mechanisms of media influence rather than on how these media present China's image. Accordingly, this study will focus on how China's image is presented in the Malaysian Chinese-language media, Sin Chew Daily, and the English-language media, The Star, in order to examine how China's image is presented in both newspapers. Do the images presented by different linguistic media vary depending on cultural and linguistic factors? This study examines the differences between pro-China tycoons and political parties that own Sin Chew Daily and The Star, respectively, considering the influence of their organizational networks. We used a web crawler to crawl data from Sin Chew Daily and The Star newspaper to collate media reports on the China epidemic between 31 December 2019 and 31 December 2021 and to analyze and critically discuss the content of the outbreak in terms of the types of issues involved (image of healthcare and its controversies, information control, personal freedom control, the origin of the virus): content analysis and critical discourse analysis. Research and think tanks have often categorized Sin Chew Daily and The Star as ''pro-China'' media. This paper finds, however, that different media outlets have different levels of focus on the various controversies in the incident, and even individual media attention and content are pretty diverse in their presentation of diverse controversial issues. Through critical discourse analysis, this study finds that when Sin Chew Daily presents its content positively or negatively, its discourse works through favorable rhetorical terms regarding emotions, morals, and rights by reproducing or rationalizing ideological presentations. On the other hand, the Star, as an English-language medium, is ideologically biased towards Western values, such as reporting on concepts such as human rights, universal values, and civil society |