“Construction of Heroes and Culprits in Reporting Coronaviruses: Ideology in Lexical Choices”

Ahmad Idris Asmaradhani

Graduate School of Universitas Gresik,

Jawa Timur - Indonesia

Email: denver.idris@gmail.com

ABSTRACT

This article is intended to discuss the contrasts between lexical choices in China Daily (CD) and New York Time (NYT) in reporting about the case of coronaviruses suffered by the people of China in particular and other countries in general. By analyzing the detailed differences, this article also aims at revealing the hidden ideologies in the news discourse implied in the two news resources. Applying the method of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and the theory of ideology proposed by van Dijk (1998) and drawing on the framework of lexical classification in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), this study found that both CD and NYT news resources are different in reporting the events of china coronaviruses. Both resources encode ideologies to put forth their influence on readers’ view towards the sphere they present. This study also reveals that in terms of CDA and based on the way they choose and use lexicons, CD can be seen as ideologically constructs the heroes to represent what their people have done while NYT ideologically constructs the culprits to represent the same things.

Keywords: coronaviruses, ideology, lexical choice, lexical cohesion.