MH370 and MH17 airplane catastrophes

Abstract


 Reporting verbs are important in news articles on controversial events or issues because of the need to present one’s position on the topic or at least indicate the attitudes of the sources cited in the articles. The The study investigated the usage of reporting verbs in MH370 and MH17 airplane catastrophe in Malaysian English online newspapers. The aspects analysed were the reporting verbs for speaker stance and writer stance. A total of 80 news articles on MH370 and MH17 airplane catastrophes taken from two online English-language Malaysian newspapers, New Straits Time and The Star, were analysed using Thomson and Ye’s (1991) framework on reporting verbs. The analysis identified 931 instances of RVs: 764 instances for speaker stance, and 167 instances for writer stance. On the speaker stance, about 90% of the articles on MH370 and MH17 were reported positively, and the various sources of information were stated clearly. Negative and neutral speaker stances were infrequent. As for writer stance, the overall results showed a balanced use of counter-factive and non-factive reporting of the writer stance (42.51% and 47.90% out of 167 instances). The two newspapers were similar in their use of verbs for reporting the writer stance in MH370 articles in that over half of the writer stances were non-factive, and about 25% were counter-factive. In their coverage on the MH17 catastrophe, The Star maintained the same pattern of balance between non-factive and counter-factive writer stances but New Straits Time leaned towards a counter-factive writer stance, suggesting more critical reporting. The study showed that the articles on airplane catastrophes leaned towards safe reporting focussed on the available details of the incident.