Critical discourse analysis of news headlines : a case of youth crime in Thailand

Abstract

This study is a critical investigation of the language used in the front page headlines of popular newspapers in Thailand regarding news that involves physical violence committed by young people. The purposes of this study are to discover the discursive features of the language used in the news headlines; to expose the ideology of news practitioners reflected in the headlines; and to expose the social identities of the teenagers that these headlines construct in society. There were 97 front page headlines used as the data of this study. These headlines were collected from three well-known popular Thai newspapers: Thairath, Daily News, and Khom Chad Luek. The data were collected from January - December, 2012. The main frameworks of this study are based on two theories: Critical Discourse Analysis or CDA and Sociocognitive Approach or SCA. The analysis section is divided into 3 levels: sociocultural practice, discursive practice, and text. This study applied the CDA framework of Fairclough and the SCA framework of van Dijk to analyse sociocultural practice and discursive practice. The notion of van Leeuwen’s representation of actors: references, Machin and Mayr’s representation of actions: transitivity, verbs, circumstances, and Richardson’s lexical choice are all applied in the textual analysis section. The results show that there are 10 discursive features in total. 4 of these discursive features function as the representation of the actors of crime events: functionalization, classification identity, relational identity, and appraisement. There are also 4 discursive features representing the actions of crime events: transitivity, transitivity giving vivid images of the violent actions, verbs showing violence, and circumstances. The 2 other discursive features function in lexical choices: metaphor and onomatopoeia. The results also show that the language usedin the headlines of the newspapers reflects certain negative ideologies of the news practitioners, as well as constructs some negative social identities of the young offenders. Moreover, the analysis of sociocultural practice and textual analysis reveals some consistent and inconsistent aspects.