Media discourses in Hong Kong: Change in representation of human rights

Winnie Cheng; Phoenix Lam

doi:10.1515/TEXT.2010.025

Media discourses in Hong Kong: Change in representation of human rights

Winnie Cheng, Phoenix Lam

Hong Kong Metropolitan University

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

24 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

This study examines the change in the representation of human rights issues in a corpus containing over 5,000 articles collected from a leading English newspaper in Hong Kong in two periods before and after the change of sovereignty in 1997 using Sinclair's (Textus 9: 75-106, 1996, Trust the text, Routledge, 2004) lexical item. The analysis of instances of the phrase 'human rights' in the corpus as a lexical item shows that the newspaper in question has changed its representation of human rights issues, particularly in China and Hong Kong, over the decade. This reflects an ideological shift in the newspaper's stance in response to the current situations in both local and world politics, and that human rights concerns are not merely a nationalistic, but also a culturally dynamic phenomenon.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	507-527
Number of pages	21
Journal	Text and Talk
Volume	30
Issue number	5
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1515/TEXT.2010.025
Publication status	Published - Oct 2010

Keywords

Hong Kong
human rights
ideological shift
lexical item
media discourse
word co-selection

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10.1515/TEXT.2010.025

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Media discourses in Hong Kong: Change in representation of human rights

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