Media representations of mining discourse in the Philippines: A critical discourse analysis

• Main Author: Diamante, Jennifier T.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2018
• Subjects: Critical discourse analysis
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_doctoral/1433; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/etd_doctoral/article/2479/viewcontent/DIAMANTE_complete2.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

Drawing on critical discourse analysis, this study described the linguistic features, discursive strategies, and macro-themes of Philippine mining discourse in media texts. Taking a diachronic perspective, the corpus of the study consisted of 224 news articles spanning five-year coverage from July 1, 2012 to June 30, 2017. Textual data were supplemented by peripheral discourses obtained through interviews with the local “symbolic elites” in the identified mining communities. Analysis of linguistic features used in discursively constructing the social actors revealed that reference with their unique identities through nomination strategies highly manifests in the mining news reports. Among the strategies particularly employed were formalization and honorification, which are consistent with the linguistic features of news genre, putting premium on specificity, accuracy, formality, and brevity. Categorization or discursively classifying social actors in terms of identities they share with others along with other strategies conveying informal and personal tones were hardly found in the data, an indication of their peculiarity in news genre. Analysis of themes reflected in the headlines and leads of mining news reports had disclosed converging and diverging patterns. On the one hand, the national media gave priority to government actions, economic phenomenon and political actors, while the local media put primacy on the actions of government agencies, mining companies, and non-governmental organizations. Both print media allotted a much lesser spatio-temporal space for environment and Indigenous Peoples’ cause. In view of the findings, the researcher concluded that the more socially prominent a social actor is in the industry and beyond, the more he or she is provided spatio-temporal space in the news report; the marginalized such as the mine workers or the small-scale investors tend to be highlighted only when unusual incidents occurred such as involvement in mining mishaps or illegal activities. Philippine mining discourse manifests as highly political and economic discourse rather than environmental or ecological. This means that mining discourse is a hybrid discourse, which permeates to various discourse plains (e.g., economic, political) making it intricate, convoluted and complicated; hence, it calls for a more systematic and methodical linguistic investigation. Keywords: referential strategies, discourse strategies, discourse themes.