Media construction of reality about non-Malaysians in the crime news of the Star newspaper /
The media constructs reality about crime through news-making process. The Star is a newspaper with the highest readership in Malaysia. The objectives of this study are to discover how and in what ways does The Star construct reality about non-Malaysians or foreigners in the local crime news. The the...
Saved in:
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Kuala Lumpur :
Kulliyyah of Islamic Revealed Knowledge and Human Sciences, International Islamic University Malaysia,
2014
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://studentrepo.iium.edu.my/handle/123456789/6667 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| Summary: | The media constructs reality about crime through news-making process. The Star is a newspaper with the highest readership in Malaysia. The objectives of this study are to discover how and in what ways does The Star construct reality about non-Malaysians or foreigners in the local crime news. The theory that underpinned this study is the social construction of reality. This study applied qualitative content analysis as the methodology to gather and analyze the data. The headlines and the narratives of the local crime news of The Star newspaper were used as units of analysis. This study found that non-Malaysians were constructed as offenders and victims in the crime news. Foreigners-as-offenders were constructed based on ethnicity and gender namely offenders among the African, Asian, and South-American men and also offenders among foreign women. The foreign men were depicted as trickster, drug-smuggler, violent-maker, illegal immigrants and pseudo-students. Offenders among foreign women were portrayed as being involved in flesh-trade, robbery, and drug cases. Foreigners-as-victims were among women, kids, and victims of in-group conflicts (male victims). This indicates that foreigners with certain status and background are constructed as transgressors to the local boundary and bringing problems to the local community. Metaphors and framed words such as culprit, vigorous, vice, dirt, and alien were used to demonstrate the notion of order and disorder and to strengthen the construction of non-Malaysians or foreigners as synonym to crime events. It seems that metaphors and framed words were used as the instrument of conceptualizing criminality and as the method of 'othering' the foreigners. There were relational dynamics of engagements between Malaysians and non-Malaysians and among the non-Malaysians themselves embedded in the narratives of local crime news of The Star. The relationships could be the causes or effects of crime events involving foreigners. |
|---|---|
| Physical Description: | xi, 161 leaves : ill. ; 30cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (leaves130-145). |