Discriminatory news discourse: some Hong Kong data

Abstract

This article analyses the discriminatory discursive practices of one leading liberal Hong Kong newspaper, the South China Morning Post, with a view to examining to what extent they mirror those found in the literature (which to date has focused primarily on Europe). The data for the study consist of 80 articles concerning one news event, Chinese Mainlanders claiming the right-of-abode in Hong Kong during the period 30 January 1999 to 19 August 2000. A review of the rather diffuse literature leads to the development of a composite taxonomy of discriminatory discursive practices. The Hong Kong data are then tested against this taxonomy. Examples of all of the strategies in the taxonomy are found to be present in the Hong Kong data, with certain local variations due to the particular situation of Hong Kong. The findings are all the more striking because the people who are the focus of the discrimination are from the same ethnic and linguistic background. In contrast to the news stories, a comparison with the editorials on the right-of-abode issue in the South China Morning Post reveals a much more liberal tone in the latter. This raises the question as to whether it is the news stories or the editorials that represent the true institutional ideology of this influential Hong Kong newspaper.

Non-native accents and simultaneous interpreting quality perceptions

“…As Mandarin is the official language of China, a Mandarin accent may be interpreted as a sign of migrant status and hence trigger the traditionally negative immigrant stereotype (Wong 1998). This is reflected in Hong Kong's popular media, with comical portrayals of accented Cantonese spoken by Chinese mainlanders (Flowerdew et al 2002).…”

Media, Social Proximity, and Risk: A Comparative Analysis of Newspaper Coverage of Avian Flu in Hong Kong and in the United States

“…Furthermore, it is a significant source of international news and plays a major role in setting the agenda in the U.S. media system (Pfau et al, 2004). SCMP is perceived as the most credible newspaper of all Chinese-and English-language newspapers (So & Chan, 2006), and as one of the newspapers of record in Hong Kong (Flowerdew, David, & Tran, 2002). According to the World Health Organization (2005c), direct contact with infected poultry and wild birds is the primary source of human infection of H5N1 virus.…”

Hegemonic and Minority Discourses Around Immigrants: A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis

“…Several studies have been conducted in different sociopolitical contexts, such as Flowerdew, Li and Tran's (2002) study on the representation of Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong, Teo's (2000) research on the discursive dimensions of the representation of immigrants in Australia and more recently Khosravinik's (2010) investigation into the discursive strategies used by numerous British newspapers to construct refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants. These previous studies, however, tend to employ various methods and approaches that are merely qualitative and focus more on news media discourse.…”