Corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) and van Leeuwen’s social actor theory were combined to examine how China Daily (CD) and The New York Times (NYT) construct agencies for their countries and attribute agencies to other nations in their coverage of sustainable development (SD). The authors were Yifan Wang and Paul Thompson from University of Birmingham.
The Brundtland Report from 1987 defines Sustainable Development (SD) as a critical global imperative addressing environmental and social concerns with economic growth. The topic used to be marginal but receives considerable policy attention and media coverage nowadays. According to De Witt (2011: 82) media does not only cover the issue, but also shapes the public perceptions surrounding it.
This study investigates the discursive strategies employed by CD and NYT to construct SD discourse, their similarities and differences, and the national stances they reflect. CD and the NYT from January 1, 2012, to December 31, 2023 in English were chosen as the materials for the study. Both newspapers represent leading English-language papers in their respective countries. The final dataset comprised two sub-corpora: 1,399 CD articles and 220 NYT articles.
As befitting a corpus-based approach, keywords were first extracted, and there was a collocation analysis. Finally, concordance analysis was conducted to identify patterns in the immediate textual context. Then social actors were identified from the corpora.
In CD, “China” was often paired with present perfect, present tense, and modal verbs, while in NYT modal verbs and action verbs were dominant. CD emphasized the duration and continuity of China’s actions, and underscored its achievements. In NYT, the US was contrasted favorably with for example China, and the agency of the US was presented critically for example when withdrawing from efforts.
When it comes to other countries, CD focused on South solidarity while NYT on the North, but both made references to developing countries, with verbs like “help” and “support” in CD and “help” and “assistance” in NYT. CD also seemed to position China as a developing country, and emphasized BRICS as a collective agent.
NYT, on the other hand, did not offer the leniency it offers to developing countries to China or Brazil due to their economic development. But generally, it presented developed countries like Norway as active, and developing ones such as Indonesia with passive.
In conclusion, the authors note the differences but also attribute them to media ownership: CD is a state-owned paper, while NYT is a privately owned one. This contributed to the relative lack of criticism of China in CD and the bold critique of American actions in NYT. Further studies could be broader in scope and study more media outlets.
The article “Who Leads and Who Hesitates? Media Construction of National Agency in Sustainable Development News” by Yifan Wang and Paul Thompson is in Journalism Practice. (Open access).
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