English-language News Media Research Articles

What happened to climate change? CITES and the reconfiguration of polar bear conservation discourse

In the past decade, polar bears have become the poster species of climate change. But in March 2013, a joint proposal by the governments of the United States and the Russian Federation to up-list polar bears to Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) diverted public attention from climate change towards the hunting of polar bears. Prior to a vote on the proposal, non-governmental organisations spear-headed a media campaign to support the up-listing. In the United Kingdom the campaign received support from celebrities and was widely reported in English language news media. Narratives of commercial legal and illegal polar bear hunting and the imminent extinction of polar bears were aggressively promoted, rhetorically supported by the manipulation of trade and scientific data. By rendering discourses of commercial hunting and a lucrative global trade in polar bear parts highly visible, sustainable hunting and climate change-induced habitat loss were rendered invisible. Media reports of commercial hunting de-coupled polar bear conservation from climate change mitigation, and disassociated polar bear hunting from regulated indigenous subsistence practices. A review of current polar bear conservation measures and an analysis of media coverage leading up to the CITES decision reveal these conflicting discourses, and suggest that more nuanced media coverage of polar bear conservation is necessary if appropriate multilateral conservation policies are to be enacted and publicly supported.

Divergences in the English-language News Media in Singapore

Singapore Standard English (SSE) has been characterized as being internationally intelligible and close to British English, apart from a few differences. However, in the mainstream news media, where one would expect SSE to be used, one finds many usages which deviate from other standard varieties of English. This paper examines some of the divergences that are more commonly encountered in news reports, namely those involving subject-verb agreement, tenses, nouns, null arguments, sentence structure and lexis. It argues that because these divergences appear in contexts where one would expect formal SSE to be used, they give a good indication of what educated Singaporean speakers of English consider to be features of their variety of English. This paper imagines a situation where a panel decides to codify SSE, and proposes some factors they may wish to consider (e.g., social stigma, intelligibility, regularization, innovation) for treating divergences either as errors or as features. Finally, it suggests that there is a good case for treating most of the non-standardisms examined in this paper as established features of SSE, rather than errors.

Framing Latinas: Hispanic women through the lenses of Spanish-language and English-language news media

It is argued that the media’s tendency to stereotype minority groups is due, in part, to a weak identification with them. This study compared the frames used by the Miami Herald (MH), an English-language newspaper targeted to general audiences, and El Nuevo Herald (ENH), its Spanish-language counterpart targeted to Hispanics, to explore whether the stronger media identification with the audience affects the type of frames used to depict Latinas. Using framing as a theoretical framework, this investigation found that the MH emphasized the individual achievements of successful women and described them as a new profitable market. ENH highlighted the family sacrifices of successful females and depicted them as family-devoted and sensual. As a result, the greater cultural identification with the audience may avoid manifest negative stereotypes but embrace pan-ethnic stereotypes that, eventually, may become harmful because they contribute to the homogenization and racialization of a group such as Latinas.