Framing Sustainable Energy: A Comparative Analysis of Malay and English Newspapers in Malaysia

Abstract

This study aims to examine how mainstream newspapers in Malaysia frame sustainable energy. Framing is the perspective or the angle taken by newspapers when writing about a news story. How newspapers frame sustainable energy is a very important indication of how the issue is perceived by the public mostly because the media is where most people get their news and information regarding environmental and sustainability issues. A deductive, quantitative methodological approach was used to identify dominant frames and news sources in articles published in four Malaysian newspapers: News Straits Times, The Star, Berita Harian and Harian Metro between January 2018 and September 2019. Media framing theory was employed as the framework for analysis. The findings suggest that while the English and Malay newspapers shared some similarities in the way they covered sustainable energy, it is the English newspapers that are more proactive in driving the readers to be more engaged with the issue. In addition, this study extends our understanding of the contextual conditions that enable and limit journalists when reporting environmental and sustainability issues.Contribution/ Originality: Findings from this study contributes to the existing literature on the impact of media on the public's understanding and engagement with sustainability issues while extending our understanding of the contextual conditions that enable and limit journalists when reporting about environmental and sustainability issues.

Critical Review of Content Analysis Studies on Corporate Social Responsibility

“…Various papers that used quantitative content analysis as the primary method and addressed the issue in newspaper stories, regularly attached tone as one of the variables (Boukes et al, 2020;T. H. Lee & Riffe, 2019;Lunenberg et al, 2016;Mohamed et al, 2020) as the implementation of P1. However, P2 is quite unique in addressing cultural differences between Western and Eastern countries using content analysis to delve deeper into its newspaper contents.…”