Abstract
News article content analysis helps identify and understand shifts in journalistic practices. As such it can be indicative of the degree of press freedom that countries experience. In this chapter, we investigate this in terms of framing choices, lexical choice, and the manner of lexical use, and we contextualize our discussion with the findings showcased in Chap. 3.
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Notes
- 1.
TADA 2021, 11th Annual Conference in New Directions in Analyzing Text as Data. Panel on Longitudinal Studies of Language, with Philip Resnik as discussant. https://tada2021.org
- 2.
See footnote no. 6.
- 3.
The South China Morning Post, July 28, 2019.
- 4.
The China Daily, August 16, 2019.
- 5.
The South China Morning Post, June 7, 2019.
- 6.
The South China Morning Post, July 2, 2019.
- 7.
The China Daily, September 23, 2019.
- 8.
The South China Morning Post, November 28, 2019.
- 9.
These include statements of support for the protests from congressional leaders and Democratic presidential candidates and meetings between Hong Kong opposition figures and administration officials. Two such meetings that have been seized upon by China are one with a diplomat in the United States Consulate in Hong Kong, and another with Vice President Mike Pence and President Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton; see among others https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/world/asia/china-hong-kong-protests.html
- 10.
“The belief that foreign forces, and especially the United States, were behind the Hong Kong protests feeds into a narrative that dates back to the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union each sought to subvert the other’s ideology and its proxy states with spies and subterfuge. Ideological rivalry has now subsided, with even China, though nominally still wedded to communism, showing no interest in exporting Marxism through subversion. But both Moscow and Beijing have in recent years sought to blame outsiders for domestic troubles—notably when Russia alleged that Michael McFaul, the American ambassador to Moscow from 2012 to 2014, was an instigator of street protests against Vladimir V. Putin, who was then the prime minister. China has until now mostly avoided attacking American diplomats by name, leaving this to nationalist bloggers like those who accused Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former ambassador to Beijing, of trying to stoke a “Jasmine Revolution” in China in 2011 by appearing outside a McDonald’s restaurant in Beijing on the day of a proposed protest that never took place.” The New York Times, August 8, 2019: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/world/asia/hong-kong-black-hand.html
- 11.
- 12.
On September 24, 1983, months of consumer and investor anxiety over the rapid depreciation of the Hong Kong dollar, coupled with concern over Chinese and British negotiations about the city’s return to mainland rule, culminated in the Black Saturday crisis. Panic selling of the local currency drove its value to an all-time low (of 9.6 per US dollar, down from 6.5 per US dollar) at the start of the year, under the floating exchange rate system. Faced with public unrest and wavering confidence in Hong Kong’s banks, Financial Secretary John Bremridge announced the introduction of a linked exchange system on October 17, 1983, which pegged the currency to the US dollar at a fixed rate. The Hong Kong dollar was originally set at a rate of 7.8 per US dollar; though since 2005, it has been allowed to trade between 7.75 and 7.85 per US dollar. When the Hong Kong currency hits the low end of the band, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the city’s de facto central bank, is bound to start buying up the currency to boost its value. The peg’s introduction was an effort to re-establish confidence among citizens, investors, and corporations, while also signaling that the Hong Kong financial system was distinct from that of mainland China. The peg’s fixed exchange rate has allowed Hong Kong to strengthen its status as an international financial center, and withstand the stock market crash in 1987, the Asian financial crisis in 1998, the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in 2003, and the global financial crisis in 2008. https://www.hkma.gov.hk/eng/news-and-media/insight/1999/11/19991104/
- 13.
The South China Morning Post, November 28, 2019.
- 14.
For the purpose of this research, the term keyword is used in the information retrieval rather than the corpus linguistic sense, meaning a term that is statistically characteristic in a text. See also Douglas Biber and Randi Reppen (Eds.). (2015). The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 90–105.
- 15.
See pages 4–6.
- 16.
- 17.
There is merit to including a third ‘it’s complicated’ class (Kenyon-Dean et al., 2018).
- 18.
- 19.
For instance, whether the article is written by the western or the Hong Kong press.
- 20.
- 21.
The South China Morning Post, June 18, 2019.
- 22.
- 23.
- 24.
The New York Times, October 12, 2019.
- 25.
Ibid. November 24, 2019.
- 26.
The South China Morning Post, June 30, 2019.
- 27.
Ibid. June 17, 2019.
- 28.
Ibid. June 13, 2019.
- 29.
The full regression model containing all predictors was statistically significant, X2 (8; (N = 4522) = 723.787, p < 0.001. The model correctly classified 75% of cases, and explained between 16.9% (Cox and Snell R2) and 21.5% (Nagelkerke R2) of the cases. The strongest predictor for short headlines is the variable for The New York Times, with an Exp(β) of 6.3, whereas the weakest predictor for short headlines is the variable for the SCMP, with an Exp(β) of – 0.89.
- 30.
The Financial Times, June 6, 2019.
- 31.
Ibid. October 14, 2019.
- 32.
The full regression model containing all predictors was statistically significant, X2 (8; N = 4522) = 190.459, p < 0.001. The model correctly classified 68.7% of cases, and explained between 6.2% (Cox and Snell R2) and 9.1% (Nagelkerke R2). The strongest predictor for judgmental headlines is the variable for the Financial Times, with an Exp(β) of 3.5, followed by the variable for the NYT with an Exp(β) of 2.9, the variable for the WSJ with an Exp(β) of 2.2, and the variable for the Washington Post with an Exp(β) of 2. The weakest predictor for a judgmental headline is the variable for the SCMP, with an Exp(β) of – 0.20.
- 33.
The South China Morning Post, December 1, 2019.
- 34.
Ibid. December 2, 2019.
- 35.
The full regression model containing all predictors was statistically significant, X2 (8; N = 4522) = 174.592, p < 0.005. The model correctly classified 71.7% of cases, and explained between 5.1% (Cox and Snell R2) and 10.2% (Nagelkerke R2). The strongest predictor for neutral headlines is the variable for the China Daily with an Exp(β) of 4.2, followed by the variable for the SCMP with an Exp(β) of 2.4, the Washington Post with an Exp(β) of 1.9. The weakest predictor for a neutral headline is the variable for the Financial Times with an Exp(β) of – 0.77, followed by the NYT with an Exp(β) of – 0.65, the WSJ with an Exp(β) of – 0.53.
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Dore, G.M.D., McCarthy, A.D., Scharf, J.A. (2023). Rhetorical Tactics. In: A Free Press, If You Can Keep It. SpringerBriefs in Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27584-5_4
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