Critical discourse study of speculative discourse in the news reports of MH370

Abstract

This thesis explores the presence of speculative discourse in newspaper reports produced by local and foreign press in regards to the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370. The excessive exposures from local and foreign press towards the missing flight ascended rumours and speculations to the public, adding mystery to the tragedy. This study analyses whether representation of the MH370 tragedy includes assumptions and propositions denoting to the occurrence of speculation as well as the extent to which the value of the news content depends on uncertainty. The researcher applied both content and textual analysis to study the objectives of the thesis. Wiebe et al.’s (2001) Annotation Scheme is used in the content analysis to examine the occurrence of subjective lexical which imply speculative labels. For textual analysis, Wodak’s (2001) Discursive Strategies is applied to examine how the news reports recorded the event and what the reporting text does to the event. Besides, Van Dijk’s (1988; 1998; 2000) Ideological Square is used to analyse the positive and negative representation of social actors of the MH370 event as well as to inspect the construction of public perception about the news discourse of MH370 as Van Dijk (1998) that ideologies are manifested in discourse through lexical choice and polarization strategy. The analysis of both content and textual investigations reveal the presence of speculative speech in news headlines and articles of the 10 selected news press. The speculative discourse is reflected through immense utilisation of modals of probability, speech act verbs, apologetic quotation marks, hypothetical questions, as well as excessive utilisation of passive voice. Hence, this thesis provides a detailed analysis on the degree of speculations inferred in the news reporting of MH370 and its accuracy. Findings from the application of discursive strategies and social actor representation provide clear evidence of how speculative discourse denotes to the construction of main ideologies of the MH370 tragedy. The local news press were found to be less speculative compared to foreign newsagents. Settings such as controlled publications in Malaysia and the idea of “what sells, sells” among the foreign press are the main factors in the differences of local and foreign news