TOA 7013: FUNDAMENTALS OF LINGUISTICS

Semester 2: 2021/22

Assignment 1

Student: Tang ZiJuan

Student ID: S2037383

Assignement 1
 In the modern era, people rely heavily on Media and Journalism to grasp the latest
information and things happening around us. Media and Journalism allows reasoned,
rational, and informed involvement of citizens, which gives crucial guarantee for the
function and the life-blood of democracy (Brundidge et al., 2014; Habermas, 1996; G
unther, 1992; Gil de Zúñiga, 2015). The main purpose of Media is to provide informat
ion and influence public opinion, it is expected to be objective, fair, and able to separ
ate information and opinion clearly (Farnsworth & Lichter, 2007; Schudson, 1978). H
owever, the newspapers do not always tell the whole story, they are often presented
to audiences in certain ways, using specific words to control and shape their feelings
and thoughts. Coxall and Caswell (2013) indicated that the reports of news stories ca
n be manipulated to favour a group of people’s particular interests. It can be used for
propaganda, public relations, advertising, marketing, activism, and so on. For instanc
e, advertising is the most common presentation of media, attracting people's attentio
n to certain things, in particular through paid announcements for products and servic
es. Meanwhile, some non-commercial advertisers tend to raise awareness for a parti
cular cause and ideas to deliver the message or sway public opinion. Another examp
le is televised manipulation. According to Cengiz (2019), television has been seen as
the most objective and simplest way for people to get news due to an assumption th
at pictures are always more objective than words. Nevertheless, the coexistence of t
elevision and politics is unavoidable, for example, governments use television to ann
ounce their agenda and ideologies. In the beginning of 21 century, the American gov
ernment accused Saddam of the 911 event and there was the hype about Saddam H
ussein’s crime in Iraq and other regions in the Middle East, he was described as a de
vil on American television programs. This kind of propaganda successfully aroused t
he American people’s anger towards Saddam and their sympathy towards the Iraqi p
eople, the war against Iraq soon became a movement of justice, although the truth b
ehind the war was revealed later. Furthermore, research indicated negative news rep
orts account for the majority in recent years because people pay more attention to ba
d things. Plus, the ultimate goal of the media industry is maximising profits, thus, the
coverage has gradually deviated from its orbits of being objective and fair. Media ma
nipulation has become a powerful tool to persuade, influence, and impose others' ide
ologies on people. As human beings, it is significant for us to think independently an
d critically. Surrounded by the flood of messages and information, we cannot help as
king which one should I trust? According to which side society shapes its opinions?
Which ideology is more approaching truth and goodness?

The reasons why the public may be manipulated by the media can be diverse and
complicated. In my view, as the technologies developed apace, we have a variety of
ways to access all kinds of information and news. Some surveys give information tha
t applications or websites like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter have become the most po
pular platform for the information resources of today’s generation. Flintham et al. (20
18) presented that the majority of participants regularly receive news via Facebook,
and 33% of them encounter fake coverage, which they initially perceived to be true.
People are surrounded by the flood of information, gradually becoming distracted, im
patient, insufficient. This results in a disability in distinguishing the true from the false.
Media corporations make use of this to deliver the biased messages to people and t
ry to shape their views in order to fulfil certain groups' interests. Additionally, a comm
on strategy for media manipulation recently is taking advantage of Conformity, meani
ng that an individual would believe what the majority believes in. Therefore, when on
e-sided comments on a particular topic are accounting for the majority, people would
be convinced of these opinions. This phenomenon can be observed everywhere on t
he internet. When we are reading some political topics, due to the lack of historical k
nowledge about this issue, we can easily go astray and blindly follow the views of the
majority. An example from my own experience, the recent Ukraine conflict with Russi
a is heatedly debated. When I am browsing the comments under the related topics, t
he comments all attack Ukraine, the President Zelensky, NATO (the USA), and prais
e the Russian President Putin. These comments are overwhelmingly one-sided, igno
ring the basic facts of history, but there are still a large number of followers. This can
be attributed to the deliberate media orientation of the government. Media manipulati
on is a control of information, and information access symbolises the liberty of huma
n rights. Thus, restricting information access violates basic human rights because, wi
th information, we can think from the good sides and bad sides, from the causes an
d effects, from the past and future; with information, we can create and develop; with
information, we can see the flaws of ourselves, think who we are, explore the inside
of ourselves. Media manipulation is just like a cloud, blocking the way for us to be fr
ee to see the sky. In order to look at a problem comprehensively and objectively, we
must have the ability to think independently and critically. Therefore we should firstly
get to know how the media is manipulating the news reports, in what way that media
is biassed, because only we know the whole truth behind the phenomenon, then can
we resolve these issues. Hence, linguistic research, as one of the most scientific met
hods, helps us recognize the fact of media bias and manipulation, in particular corpu
s studies. At the same time, corpus study, as a significant branch of linguistics resear
ch, which investigates language use based on real-world examples (McEnery & Wils
on, 2001). It is a collection of language uses in different areas, often assisted by co
mputer tools. In fact, there are some well-known corpus such as the American Englis
h Dialect Recordings, British National Corpus, The Corpus of Historical American En
glish, Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) and etc..
When examining the language used in media bias and manipulation, corpus study pl
ays a vital role. For instance, the researcher has to collect a large amount of data fro
m different news agencies, build a language database which contains a great deal o
f news reporting resources, then analyse the word frequencies, concordances, keyne
ss of the collected corpus with the help of computer software . It enables linguistics s
cholars to rely on naturally occurring data instead of some made-up resources, whic
h makes the research more authentic and reflects reality. Therefore, reading corpus l
inguistic research helps the readers learn clearly the different ways of presenting ne
ws stories based on real-world examples.
A large number of corpus linguistic researches (Watanabe, 2017; Al-Gamde & Ten
brink, 2020; Chen, 2013; Chung, 2011; Yu et al., 2021) investigate the ‘objectivity’ of
news reporting, explore various real-world examples of media manipulation and com
pare different ideologies reflected from coverages between different regions, especia
lly between the western and the eastern countries. It helps us learn different views o
n certain topics and makes us fully aware of biassed news coverage by using scientif
ic proof of such manipulation. In the research of Yu et al. (2021), they designed a cor
pus study to distinguish the different keywords used in COVID-19 news reports betw
een the UK and China. The main finding illustrated that Chinese media used more o
bjective and neutral words to report the epidemic, while UK newspapers described it
in a more negative tone, and as time went by, the word choices of UK media tended
to focus more on physical restriction and medical prevention. Another corpus study o
f the SARS epidemic conducted by Chung (2011) attempted to compare two newspa
pers from Malaysia and the UK when introducing SARS to their respective readers. T
he results of Chung’s study (2011) indicated that the Malaysian press was acting like
a motivator due to the spirit of collectivism, encouraging people to be united, patriotic,
brave to fight against the SARS; whereas in the UK, the Times functioned as a main
tainer of the world, they blamed “others” for the SARS epidemic outbreak and concer
ned more about trades, stocks, tournaments. Apart from these investigations on vari
ous opinions towards an outbreak of an international epidemic, other researchers an
alysed different voices on tensions, wars, and revolutions (Watanabe, 2017; Al-Gam
de & Tenbrink, 2020; Chen, 2013). Watanabe (2017) explored the biassed news rep
orts on the Ukraine crisis of ITAR - TASS, a leading news agency in Russia. Watana
be (2017) concluded that ITAR - TASS’ biassed coverage of the Ukraine crisis reflect
ed the Russian government’s interests in the country. Most importantly, ITAR - TASS
mixed the negative and positive descriptions of the Ukraine crisis to make their news
stories accepted and redistributed in order to disseminate ideologies to foreign medi
a and audiences. Similarly, in the studies of Al-Gamde and Tenbrink (2020) and Che
n (2013), they looked into biassed coverages of the Syrian Civil War by the Iranian m
edia Fars and two news agencies (The NewYork Time and China Daily) reporting the
2011 Libyan civil war respectively. These researches analysed the different word cho
ices, frequencies, keyness of different corpus of news stories, they all presented vari
ous degrees of media bias and the discrepancies in the accuracy of news reporting s
haped by different ideologies and interests. Such linguistic research shows the fatal f
laws of Media and Journalism by investigating a variety of social issues. The objecti
vity and fairness of the media builds a base of the democratic system (Brundidge et
al., 2014; Habermas, 1996; Gunther, 1992; Gil de Zúñiga, 2015), if without the two e
xtremely crucial principles, the human mind cannot be completely liberated. As Thom
as Paine’s poem says, “When men yield up/ The exclusive privilege of thinking/The
last shadow of liberty/Quits the horizon.”

References
Al-Gamde, A., & Tenbrink, T. (2020). Media Bias: A Corpus-based Linguistic Analy
sis of Online Iranian Coverage of the Syrian Revolution. Open Linguistics, 6(1), 584–
600. doi:10.1515/opli-2020-002810.1515/opli-2020-0028
Brundidge, J., Garret, K., Rojas, H., & Gil de Zúñiga, H. (2014). Political participatio
n and ideological news online: “Differential gains” and “differential losses” in a presid
ential election cycle. Mass Communication & Society, 17, 464-486. doi:10.1080/1520
5436.2013.821492
Coxall, Malcolm (2 Mar 2013). Caswell, Guy (ed.). Human Manipulation - A Handbo
ok. Cornelio Books. ISBN 978-8-4940-8532-1
Cengiz, G. (2019). Manipulation of television news and its effects on democracy. Jo
urnal of Advances in Humanities and Social Sciences, 5(6). https://doi.org/10.20474/j
ahss-5.6.2
Chen, S. (2013). Corpus linguistics in critical discourse analysis: A case study on n
ews reports of the 2011 Libyan Civil War. Stream: Interdisciplinary Journal of Comm
unication, 5(1), 21–28. https://doi.org/10.21810/strm.v5i1.77
Chung, S.-F. (2011). A Corpus-Based Study of SARS in English News Reporting in
Malaysia and in the United Kingdom. International Review of Pragmatics, 3(2), 270–
293. doi:10.1163/187731011x597541
Fielden, A., Grupac, M., Adamko, P. (2018). How Users Validate the Information Th
ey Encounter on Digital Content Platforms: The Production and Proliferation of Fa
ke Social Media News, the Likelihood of Consumer Exposure, and Online Deception
s. Geopolitics, History, and International Relations, 10 (2): 51-57.
Farnsworth, S. J., & Lichter, S. R. (2007). The nightly news nightmare: Television’s
coverage of US presidential elections, 1988-2004. Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefie
ld.
Gunther, A. C. (1992). Biased press or biased public? Attitudes toward media cover
age of social groups. Public Opinion Quarterly, 56, 147-167. doi:10.1086/269308
Gil de Zúñiga, H. (2015). Toward a European public sphere? The promise and peril
s of modern democracy in the age of digital and social media. International Journal o
f Communication, 9, 3152-3160.

Habermas, J. (1996). Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory

of law and democracy (W. Rehg, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

HAWKS, D. O. U.G.L. A. S. (2021). Take online courses. earn college credit. Rese
arch Schools, Degrees & Careers. Study.com | Take Online Courses. Earn College
Credit. Research Schools, Degrees & Careers. Retrieved from https://study.com/aca
demy/lesson/what-is-advertising-definition-lesson-examples.html#transcriptHeader
 MBA Skool Team. (2018). Non-commercial advertising meaning & definition. MBA
Skool. Retrieved from https://www.mbaskool.com/business-concepts/marketing-and-
strategy-terms/11130-non-commercial-advertising.html

McEnery, T. and A. Wilson. 2001. Corpus linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univers

ity Press.

Schudson, M. (1978). Discovering the news: A social history of American newspap

ers. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Yu, H., Lu, H., & Hu, J. (2021). A corpus-based critical discourse analysis of news r
eports on the COVID-19 pandemic in China and the UK. International Journal of Eng
lish Linguistics, 11(2), 36. https://doi.org/10.5539/ijel.v11n2p36

Watanabe, K. (2017). Measuring news bias: Russia’s official news agency ITAR-TA
SS’ coverage of the Ukraine crisis. European Journal of Communication, 32(3), 224–
241. doi:10.1177/026732311769573510.1177/0267323117695735