The representation of Malaysia in the Philippines media in the Lahad Datu incident / Ng Kit Meng

This study attempts to investigate how ‘Malaysia’ is constructed in the incident of ‘The Standoff at Lahad Datu’ through the media of an online newspaper in the Philippines, i.e. ‘Inquirer.net’. The Lahad Datu incident, which happened on 11th February 2013, involves a territorial dispute between the armies of the Sultanate of Sulu, from the Philippines, and Malaysia. A group that calls themselves the ‘Royal Security Forces of the Sultanate of Sulu and North Borneo’, led by Jamalul Kiram III declared their territorial claim on eastern Sabah (formerly known as North Borneo) and cost the lives of a few men on the battle field. A number of controversial issues arose after the incident, such as arguing the cause of the shootout, the failure of both governments to report the truth via the media, and allegations of human rights abuses. Even the issue of the Philippines’s claim over North Borneo (now Sabah) that started way back at 1962 was argued as one of the causes that sparked off the incident. In order to achieve the aims of this study, 23 online news articles featured on ‘Inquirer.net’ about the ‘Lahad Datu Standoff’ are analyzed using Wodak’s Discourse- Historical Approach (2009) (henceforth DHA) and van Leuween’s socio-semantic approach (2008) in Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA). By employing both DHA and socio-semantic approach simultaneously, this study intends to discover the representation of Malaysia through referential and predication strategies, and investigate how it is realized linguistically by uncovering possible underlying prejudices and ideologies. The findings reveal that Malaysia is indeed represented negatively in the media selected for this study through referential and predication strategies (Wodak, 2009), and the representation of social actors (van Leuween, 2008). Results also reveal that Malaysia is represented as the negative-other by referring it to power, religion and opposition parties, and further predicated as violent, lacking humanitarianism and being deceiving