Abstract
The problems, protests and politics of the state university system are constantly featured in Sri Lankan media. While researchers have shown systemic reasons for violence in universities (Weeramunda, 2008; Samaranayake, 2015), public perception of undergraduates, as shown in the media, appears to construe students as needlessly rebellious and in perpetual protest. With the understanding that the media representation of a group is an important part of public discourse, this paper aims to conduct a qualitative analysis of the Sri Lankan undergraduate as shown in selected newspapers from the Sinhala press. Editorials, feature articles and news reports in Sinhala newspapers (both state-owned and privately-owned) from an eventful week in January 2012 are studied closely. A secondary aim is to identify linguistic structures used for stance-taking in Sinhala media discourse. The findings show a significant difference in the representation of undergraduates between these two types of newspapers, with the state-controlled newspapers covering undergraduate issues less whilst at the same time portraying them in a polarised manner (as victims or agents of aggression). Privately-owned newspapers provide more coverage of student issues, often incorporating student voices and explicitly showing their support of student causes. In terms of language structures, analysis shows that the discourse of the Sinhala press incorporates linguistic features such as metaphors, focused clauses, double negation, and subject deletion for stance-marking. Overall, this paper illustrates divergent public discourses on undergraduates present in Sinhala media.
Highlights
The problems, protests and politics of the state university system are constantly featured in Sri Lankan media
Analysing the representation of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in Dutch newspapers in the 1980s, Teun van Dijk (1988) contended that the study of dominant ideologies reproduced by media needs deeper semantic analyses than those provided by quantitative oriented content analysis
This paper presented an analysis of the discursive representation of Sri Lankan undergraduates in the Sinhala press
Summary
The problems, protests and politics of the state university system are constantly featured in Sri Lankan media. Analysing the representation of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in Dutch newspapers in the 1980s, Teun van Dijk (1988) contended that the study of dominant ideologies reproduced by media needs deeper semantic analyses than those provided by quantitative oriented content analysis. Following this tenet, this paper discusses the representation of the undergraduate of state universities in the Sinhala press of Sri Lanka. Van Dijk's (1991) analysis of Dutch newspapers in the 1980s is an illuminating illustration of how the influx of Tamil refugees to Netherlands (and other parts of Europe) at the time was constructed by the press and the political elite as a ‘problem’ and used later by conservative political elements to continue anti-immigration policies. The selection and portrayal of events and actors in the press is not an accidental or random happening but part of larger discourses at work in society
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