Content Analysis of Violence in Major Philippine Broadsheets

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Editorial articles published in newspapers have been serving its popular argumentative purpose to various readers for years affecting how people understand and see depicted national and international issues. There is one underlying question in this regard, "is there a textual evidence showing subtlety on the writtenness of these textual genre?" And so, this study attempted to investigate how writers depict types of violence using various linguistic elements and socio-cognitive strategies and how they employ linguistic features embedding functions in argumentative editorials seemingly designed to be retrieved using these strategies.

METHODS

The current study is corpus-based employing the principles of content analysis. Using this linguistic lens, a total of 30 argumentative editorials culled from the Manila Bulletin, The Philippine Star and Philippine Daily Inquirer published from the time President Duterte took office (June 2016) to February 2018 were scrutinized. The analysis is based on descriptive approach as it is dependent on the phenomena found in the content analysis of the corpus of the study. The research design requires a researcher to observe, describe, and investigate how texts behave in a journalistic corpus.

RESULTS

The current study revealed that there is an evident depiction of violence and possible abuses of the constitutional law in the argumentative editorial texts. Furthermore, these texts were rich in linguistic features subtlety manipulated as revealed in the filtered functions of the socio-cognitive strategies and media manipulation techniques, tenses and voices of the verb, functions and structures of sentences, hedges, modals, cliches and tautologies. The result, the researcher was able to devise a typology / conceptual construct which might serve as a basis for other corpus-based analyses.

DISCUSSIONS

The result of the study indicates the need for second language (L2) trainers (subject teachers and campus journalism mentors) and authors to redefine the various functions of many linguistic features which must be contextually perceived and demarcated such as in the problem of universality (as in the function of the tenses of the verb to express meaningful sentences). Moreover, it signifies that there is a pressing need to review similar editorial texts and other news articles in campus papers as well as memoranda, and other school reports. This action will benefit the future constructs of the similar documents.