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Article published In:
Language, Politics and Media: The Hong Kong Protests
Edited by Guofeng Wang and Ming Liu
[Journal of Language and Politics 21:1] 2022
► pp. 81–116

Media portrayals of the Hong Kong Occupy Central Movement’s social actors

Multilevel and critical discourse analysis

ORCID logo | Lingnan University
 | The Education University of Hong Kong
We investigated how two English-language newspapers – Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (SCMP) and the mainland China Daily (CD) – portrayed key social actors (police, students, protesters, and governments) during the Occupy Central/Yellow Umbrella movement. We examined emotional valence, arousal, and dominance characterizations in 1,180 news articles via a multilevel, multivariate outcome regression and critical discourse analysis. The findings reveal that emotional sentiments associated with students and protesters in SCMP were generally more positive than in CD but that this was reversed for the police and the government. Whereas SCMP deployed personal stories to construct a humanized image of protesters and students, CD relied on expert authority, rhetorical questions, and imagined scenarios to convey empathy towards Hong Kong residents, creating a villainized image of protesters. Our mixed-methods approach reveals how SCMP and CD portrayed students differently via the discursive frames of “optimistic dreamers” and “powerless scapegoats,” respectively.
Keywords: Occupy Central, Hong Kong, news media, social actors, multilevel analysis, critical discourse analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Discursive construction of identity and power
  • 3.Integrating critical discourse analysis with sentiment analysis
  • 4.Data and methods
    • 4.1Data
    • 4.2Variables
      • 4.2.1Sentiment ratings
      • 4.2.2Article attributes
      • 4.2.3Sentence attributes
    • 4.3Analysis
      • 4.3.1Analytic difficulties and statistics strategies
      • 4.3.2Explanatory model
      • 4.3.3Qualitative analysis
  • 5.Findings
    • Valence
    • Arousal
    • Dominance
  • 6.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 22 September 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.20030.ho
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