The Presence of Portuguese and Indonesia in Timor Leste as Depicted by Australian and British Broadcasting Corporation

Bana Supeno

doi:10.15642/nobel.2020.11.1.69-82

Abstract

The discussion in this paper is intended to describe how Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) views Timor Leste during the period of Portuguese occupation, Indonesia’s presence, until the present-day conditions. Using some van Dijk’s models of CDA to examine the statements to represent its history in some editorials published by ABC and BBC news resources, the analysis was carried out at the levels of selected statements with regard to the linguistic features of lexical choices, nominalization, passivization, and overcompleteness. The results of the analysis show that the statements constructed by ABC and BBC’s news editorials as the news discourse about the history of Timor Leste in such relations are discursively biased in terms of CDA. With various differences in terms of the linguistic features, the result also in line with the view that both ABC and BBC’s statements are mostly dichotomizing Portuguese into ‘Us’ while Indonesia into ‘Them’ in terms of van Dijk’s ‘ideological square’.

Highlights

Social media—in whatever form they are—play a very important role in the making of the people’s viewpoints
A descriptive-analytic method of research was utilized in this study, and the corpus was analyzed in order to see whether the discourse of the two social media editorials promotes any ideological orientations towards the content of the news on the historical presence of Portuguese and Indonesia in Timor Leste
Each of the statements related to the four parts of the history of Timor Leste

Summary

Introduction

Social media—in whatever form they are—play a very important role in the making of the people’s viewpoints. In terms of Critical Discourse Analysis (hereinafter CDA), not many people are aware of different ideological stances that are embedded in these editorials. Exploring these ideological stances in the media discourse is currently a very common topic for many research studies in CDA. 2) states, “the media is an important element within research on contemporary processes of social and cultural change.”. 126-128) argues that news reports signify an established category of media discourse that requires a distinct method of structural analysis As Fairclough (1995a, p. 2) states, “the media is an important element within research on contemporary processes of social and cultural change.” van Dijk (1998, pp. 126-128) argues that news reports signify an established category of media discourse that requires a distinct method of structural analysis

Methods

Results

Conclusion