Transitivity and Perspectivisation in the representation of social actors in the media coverage of the 2019 Hong Kong protests

Protests take place in specific temporal and spatial frames and are witnessed first-hand only by a few people; therefore, public reception and outcomes of protest movements depend highly on their media representation. While some research on media discourse of protests emphasises how mainstream media’s treatment of protest movements tend to be largely negative, others highlight that the affordances of web 2.0 allow alternative media narratives to spread into the communication network (Castells 2015). In this regard, the coverage of the 2019 Hong Kong protests may provide significant insights, for it has been shaped by opposing forces attempting to gain primacy in the communication network. On the one hand, state-affiliated media appear to adhere to the protest paradigm (Lee and Chan 2018); on the other, liberal-oriented and independent outlets set forth alternative discourses. The proposed paper sets out to analyse comparatively and qualitatively the representation of social actors in three prominent Hong Kong's English-language online news outlets, which hold contrastive perspectives and conflicting ideological orientations, to examine the extent to which these differences are reflected in the discourse of the 2019 protest wave. The paper will focus on the specific contextual features that influence news production processes and the relevance of ideological underpinnings of newsroom procedures in terms of perspectivisation. Hence, the paper tries to answer how the ideological underpinnings of newsrooms’ production processes and the socio-political context have impacted the representation of social actors during the 2019 Hong Kong protests. To this end, the research draws on the theoretical stance of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), both of which acknowledge the dialectical relationship between language and the social context (Hart 2016). Methodologically, combining the dialectical-relational approach to CDA (Fairclough 2015) and SFG analytical categories allows for a comprehensive analysis of textual instances against their social context. Building on works that regard transitivity as the foundation of representation (Fowler 1991), a transitivity analysis will be carried out to investigate how the meaning potential of language is realised at the ideational level to construct conflicting representations of the protest movement. In addition, the socio-semantic inventory provided by the Social Actor Model (Van Leeuwen 2013) will be employed to account for the referential scope of transitivity patterns. The data gathered consist of online published articles drawn from a six-month monitoring of the protests’ coverage (from June to November 2019) by three prominent local media outlets (China Daily, South China Morning Post, Hong Kong Free Press). In short, the paper explores how transitivity patterns in the discourse of the 2019 Hong Kong protests reflect ideologically oriented representations of social actors under the conditions of the local media ecology.