Polarisation of Expertise in The News Media: The Thai Cave Boys’ Rescue

A corpus of English language texts from news media sources worldwide was analysed to verify how the polarisation of the various options reported about the rescue of 12 Thai boys trapped in a cave in 2018 was constructed linguistically and realised discursively. Quantitative findings were interpreted from the perspectives of domain specific languages, media language studies and media psychology. News sources were able to construct polarised opinions among experts but not among lay audiences, for lack of expert knowledge of both the journalists and their readership