CHAPTER 4 - RESEARCH METHODOLOGY AND QUESTIONS

CHAPTER 4 – RESEARCH METHODOLOGY AND QUESTIONS

4.1 RESEARCH METHOD
According to Jim A. Kuypers in his book Press Bias and Politics, controversial issues are, by their essential nature, unsolvable to everyone’s satisfaction. In dealing with the Suqiu episode, I will use framing analysis to understand how Malaysian mainstream press framed this episode.

As noted by Kuypers (2002:3), public [communication] do not exist in vacuum, but usually what politicians and other public figures say in public “is a response to a situation of some sort … [thus], when analysing the words, or utterances, of a speaker, it is important to understand the situation surrounding the problem a speaker is addressing”.

George Bateson (as quoted in Kuypers 2002:4) defines context as “a collective form for all those events which fell the organism among what set of alternatives he must make his next choice”.

Bernard C. Cohen (as quoted in Kuypers 2002:4-5) observed that the press “may not be very successful in telling its readers what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about”.

Kuypers (2002:5) noted that the press is a “good indication of the issues and ideas that informed voters and opinion leaders will be talking about … and they are good indicators of that which still needs to be addressed in public policy or that they should be talking about”.

Trent and Friedenberg (1991:107) observed that the media “have a great deal of influence” on politics and in telling the public what to think about.

Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw (as quoted in Kuypers 2002:5) suggested that voters learn about an issue “in direct proportion” to the attention given that issue by the press, and that voters tend to share what the media defines as important.

Kuypers (2002:5) added that “often, the longer an issue remains in news focus, the more the public perceived it as a crisis”. Michael B. Salwen (as quoted in Kuypers 2002:5) highlighted the importance of this consideration when he suggested that the policymakers “will address issues only when these issues are perceived as crises by the public”.

Kuypers (2002:7) observed that framing “involves the relationship between qualitative aspects of news coverage – contextual cues – and how public interprets the news”. William Gamson (as quoted in Kuypers 2002:7) asserted that a “frame is a central organising ideas for making sense of relevant events and suggesting what is at issue”.

Kuypers (2002:7) noted that “facts remain neutral until framed, thus, how the press frames an issue or event will affect public understanding of that issue or event”. Gamson (as quoted in Kuypers 2002:7) argued that facts “take on their meaning by being embedded in a frame or story line that organises then and give them coherence, selecting certain ones to emphasise while ignoring others”.

Framing, then, according to Kuypers (2002:7), “is the process whereby communicators act to construct a particular point of view that encourages the facts or a given situation to be viewed (or ignored) in a particular manner, with some facts made more noticeable than other”.

Agenda-setting, according to Kuypers (2002:8), can be described as “the role the media play in focusing the public’s attention on a particular object or issue over another object or issue, primarily by how much attention the media gives to that object or issue”.

During the Suqiu ‘controversy’, other more pressing issues ‘ignored’ by the media were like the crack in UMNO hegemony, and the cold response by PAS to UMNO-proposed Malay unity talk.

Second-level agenda-setting deals with the amount of attention media gives on a particular attributes within a particular object or issue. For example, in the framing of Suqiu episode, Malay politicians and Malay-language papers choose to highlight the ‘communal’, instead of the ‘universal’ aspect of the Appeals.

According to Doris Graber (as quoted in Kuypers 2002:8), agenda-building (which Kuypers called agenda-extension) is the “process whereby news stories influence how people perceive and evaluate issues and policies”. Kuypers (2002:8) observed that agenda-extension “involves the influencing of public opinion”.

This evaluative component in press coverage on an issue or event enable the seemingly neutral news reports to actually influence the way readers interpret an issue or event, even without the press actively advocating such view. By doing so, the press could tell us how to think about an issue, besides telling us what to think about.

In order for the media to influence public opinion, issue or object have to be framed in a certain manner. Thomas Nelson et al. (quoted in Kuyper 2002:9) noted that one of the example of frames is to present audiences with either one of two stories.

Another technique of framing, as advanced by Zhongdang Pan and Gerald M. Kosicki (in Kuygers 2002:10) is that each news story will have a theme that “structurally located lexical choices of codes constructed by following certain shared rules and conventions”.

Kuypers (2002:10) observed that “these codes and lexical choices are the tools that news-makers use to construct news discourse and the psychological stimuli the audience processes when reading the news”. It was observed that during the Suqiu episode, the Malay-language papers used ‘tuntutan’ [demand] and ‘ugutan’ [blackmail] instead of ‘rayuan’ [appeal] to describe the Appeals.

Kuypers (2002:10) noted that “the lexical choices made to act to frame the news story so that it facilitates a dominant reading of that story”.

Robert M. Entman (in Kuypers 2002:11) noted that framing process “begins with the interaction of sources and journalists” which he called “even-specific schema” Once in place, Entman noted, it will encourage journalists to “perceive, process, and report all further information about the event in ways supporting the basic interpretation encoded in the schema”. Entman (1993:52) noted that framing involves “selection” and “salience”. Selection involves a deliberate process in selecting a piece of information to report and preclude others. Salience involves highlighting the selected information while intentionally diminishing others.

By doing so, frames could defines problems, identifying the cause, and suggest solutions. As noted by David Weaver (as quoted in Kuypers 2002:199), “salience is the key to any attempt to put a certain spin or interpretation on an issue, event, product or person. By highlighting or emphasizing certain aspects, or attributes, the media can influence not only the way we think about, but how we think about it”.

In the Suqiu episode, the first contact between journalist and source was between influential Malay paper Utusan journalists with the then deputy prime minister Abdullah that describe the Appeals as conditions for supports. Subsequent news report by Utusan will argued along this theme.

This thesis will use framing analysis – which was proposed by Erving Goffman in 1974 – to understand how the episode was initially framed by politicians and media. Four themes had been identified from the news reports and commentaries on this episode gathered. Close relationship between the press and politicians in Malaysia might explain the similarity between the framing of politicians and the press on this issue.

In understanding the role of the press in this episode, the analysis will focus on what attributes of this episode the press focused on, and how those attributes are stressed in order to influence audiences’ reactions. As noted by Kuypers (2002:199), “in framing, it is not the frequency of a word, metaphor, or concept that account for its strength, but rather how it is consistently framed across time”.

As noted by Kuypers (2002:12), “instead of an objective Fourth Estate, the media have evolved into a partisan collective which both consciously and unconsciously attempts to persuade the public to accept its interpretation of the world as true”.

Bob Kohn through his book Journalistic Fraud: How The New York Times Distorts the News and Why It Can No Longer Be Trusted shows explicitly how “misinformation” was carried out by slanting the presentations of the facts in leads, headlines and placement of the news item in the paper. As demonstrated by Kohn, there are nine ways a journalist could distort a news reports.

4.2 UNIT OF ANALYSIS
This thesis will analyse headlines and text of news reports and commentaries. Attention will be on the choice of words used in the news reports, particularly on the differences – if any – between articles from different language papers.

Headlines will be a unit of analysis because only a small percentage of those who read the headline actually read the rest of the story (Kohn 2003:87). Kohn (2003:76) also noted that “the vast majority of people who read newspapers gain their understanding of the news by glancing at the headlines and subheads. To influence the headlines is to influence public opinion”.

As for commentaries, this thesis will analyse the argument used, and how these argument fit into the frames used by the press when telling stories of this episode. It is expected that commentaries will assert their opinion forcefully, but this thesis will also try to identify how news stories reflect these same opinions by relying on the quotations from sources that agreed with their stand.

The choice of verbs used in the reports will also be compared across papers of different languages. In the data collection, it was identified that different verbs were used to describe the Appeals and what it means to both the Suqiu Committee and politicians.

4.3 METHOD OF DATA COLLECTION
The primary data for this thesis are collected from main section of Malay and English language papers from the period of six months leading up to the Malaysian general elections on 29 November 1999.

The English language papers are New Straits Times, The Star and The Sun, while the Malay language papers are Utusan Malaysia and Berita Harian.

The primary data for Mandarin language papers – Sin Chew Daily, Nanyang Siang Pao, and China Press – are from the news clipping compiled by Suqiu Committee, which was later published into a book. Thus, translation service was sought through a Malaysian journalist who had excellent command in Mandarin and English. The first process involved translating the headlines, and these headlines were checked with the existing news reports from Malay and English language papers. Then, 28 news reports and 2 commentaries were chosen for full translation. One translator was involved in this process to ensure consistency in the translated articles.

In addition to that, the Suqiu controversy resurfaced again after the general elections, and was a hot topic from August 2000 until it Suqiu “set aside” 7 sub-points of the Appeals in early January 2001. The primary data from this period was mainly from the articles compiled by Suqiu Committee.

Additional data complementing primary data in this thesis were from websites like malaysiakini, newsmagazines like ASIAWEEK and Aliran, and other regional papers like The Straits Times of Singapore.

4.4 Research questions
This study also challenges the belief that Malaysia had undergone a ‘deracialisation of politics’ since the Anwar episode. This optimistic view of Malaysia, I will argue, is premature as we witness the continue relevance of ethnicity in national political discourse, especially after the 1999 general elections when UMNO attempts to gain lost grounds.

In short, this study will attempt to understand what attributes of the Suqiu episode that were emphasised by the press in the context of ethnic politics in Malaysia.

Specifically, this thesis attempts to answer these questions:
How did politicians and public figures frame this issue?
How did the press, responding to politicians and public figures reactions, frame this issue?
Were there any clear differences between the different languages papers in their framing of this issue?

In answering these questions, this thesis will used four frames that were consistently used by the press in framing the Suqiu episode. These four frames are:

Suqiu is a selfish Chinese, not Malaysian demand;
The Chinese are blackmailing the weak BN government;
The Chinese are breaking the social contracts;
Suqiu do not represent the Chinese community.

Frame A and D might contradict Frame B and C but that does not stop politicians and the press from framing Suqiu episode in that way. Almost all news reports and commentaries collected could be analysed from these four frames.

The data in this thesis is not exhaustive, and did not aimed to be. Rather, it is more interested in understanding how the press framed the Suqiu episode, and how these frames fit into the broader picture of ethnic politics in Malaysia.