| Author: | Yi, Li |
| Title: | Dynamic representation of social actors across stages of public health crises : a corpus-assisted critical discourse study of the Covid-19 news from China daily and the New York times |
| Advisors: | Ngai, Cindy (CBS) Wu, Doreen (CBS) |
| Degree: | DALS |
| Year: | 2022 |
| Subject: | Discourse analysis COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020 -- Press coverage COVID-19 (Disease) -- Social aspects Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | Faculty of Humanities |
| Pages: | 192 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Social actors, the individuals or collectives who perform certain roles and take specific social actions, are of particular importance in the outbreak of health crisis. The concrete social actors “in the picture” of the crisis news manifest the concrete social values produced, circulated, and consumed in the society, which have the capacity to influence people’s risk perceptions and sway their crisis response behaviors. Previous research has shed some light on how the social actors are represented but limited is known about the representation of social actors in the public health crises in the emergence, rampancy, and suppression stages of the crisis and the diverse ways of representing the social actors in the news outlets from the local outbreaking country and the remote observing country. This thesis, therefore, aims to investigate the dynamic representation of social actors in the public health crises across their developmental stages in the outbreaking country and the observing countries. Using the news coverage of the COVID-19 crisis undergoing in China (1 December 2019 to 12 March 2020) from the newspaper China Daily (referred to as CD) and The New York Times (referred to as NYT) as the data, this thesis developed an analytical framework for social actor representation in crises by drawing on the theoretical backdrop from critical discourse studies, particularly the social actor approach proposed by van Leeuwen (1995, 2008, 2013), and then took a comparative approach to explore the diverse manners in which the social actors were represented in the outbreaking country China and the observing country the United States by examining who were represented and how they were represented with the aid of corpus tools. The analysis was conducted at both macro and micro levels. At the macro level, the configuration of social actors in reporting the COVID-19 crisis was firstly investigated by identifying and categorizing the key social actors. Eight major types of social actors were identified in reporting the crisis: virus-infected patients and virus-fighting medical community under the scientific theme; the public, governmental agencies, economic entities, and the media under the social theme; and pandemic-inducing floating population and pandemic-influenced places under the pandemic theme. It was found that the medical community, governmental agencies, the public, and pandemic-concerned places were highly visible, and the visibility of the medical community was decreasing and that of the governments continued to grow as the crisis evolved in both CD and NYT. CD was found to include a narrower range and more types of collective social actors with higher visibility of patients, whereas NYT included a wider range and more types of individual social actors with higher visibility of governments, pandemic-inducing population, and pandemic-concerned places. At the micro level, the most representative social actor “people” who were victimized by the virus and “doctors” who were taking actions to deal with the crisis were analyzed by their visibility, assimilation, agency, and actions. It was found that people and doctors were both very diversely portrayed in CD from the outbreaking country and NYT from the observing country. Generally, people and doctors as the representative social actors in the news of CD, compared with that in NYT, were represented by richer types of members in the category, by a greater description granularity in their actions, by a more interrelated social actor network, and by a more positive evaluation on the performance of social actors. These differences were caused by their differences in the geographical distance to the outbreak, the journalistic traditions, and the socio-political orientations. This research addressed the research gaps in the literature by analyzing the dynamic representation of social actors in the developmental stages of a public health crisis in the news from the outbreaking and the observing countries. This research is of theoretical reference values, and the self-developed framework and the categories of the social actors identified in the crisis are applicable for future media studies or communication studies. This comparative study also contributes to a deeper understanding of the intricate relationship between language and society, the discursive patterns and journalistic practices in social actor representation in crisis, and the cross-cultural differences in media crisis discourse and health information communication. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | restricted access |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7080.pdf | For All Users (off-campus access for PolyU Staff & Students only) | 4.87 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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