A Corpus-Based Study Of The Representation Of Police, Protester, And Student In Thai Anti-Government Protest News

Abstract

The pro-democracy protest movement in Thailand in 2020 has generated considerable public interest. Media representation of protest movement contributes greatly to the perception of people towards any event or even persons. This study was conducted to explore how frequent social actors shared between two presses of Prachatai English Corpus (PCT) and Bangkok Post Corpus (BKP) were represented. All online news articles available were collected: BKP is composed of 363 news articles and PCT is of 136 news articles. The results of collocation analysis revealed that both presses described police, protester, and student differently. Police were regarded as violent actors in PCT, whereas BKP shows that police actions were not apparent. The protester was labelled as anti-government in BKP which is distinct to the portrayal by PCT which viewed a movement as for democracy. The prominent group of student protest was represented and personalized with its own title in PCT as bad student while in BKP bad student was used as an appositive. The article engages the discussion of Van Dijk’s (1998) ideological square to demonstrate the bias existing in media representation.