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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 25, No. 0, pp.431-447
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2025
Received 17 Dec 2024 Revised 24 Jan 2025 Accepted 17 Mar 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.25..202504.431

Active Voicing in COVID-19 New Reports

Orawee Bunnag ; Kyung-Eun Park ; Krisda Chaemsaithong
(first author) Assistant Professor Department of Thai Faculty of Liberal Arts Mahidol University orawee.bun@mahidol.ac.th
(second author) Professor Department of Thai Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Seoul, South Korea kyungeunpark@hufs.ac.kr
(corresponding author) Professor Department of English Hanyang University krisda@hanyang.ac.kr


© 2025 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The present study critically scrutinizes the practice of intertextual attribution in COVID-19 news reports. Based on a corpus of 135 news articles from 2020 to 2022 in The Korea Herald, it examines 1) the distribution of sources, 2) the way in which the reporters ideologically position the sources, and 3) the pragmatic effects of such attitudinal positioning. The findings reveal that the sourcing patterns are dynamic, initially relying on state authorities but subsequently shifting towards biomedical experts as the pandemic progresses. This shift toward biomedical experts also witnesses the journalist’s construing them as epistemically superior to other sources, particularly state authorities. Such linguistic manipulation in effect potentially misleads the reader and, at times, constitutes clear cases of intentional misrepresentation. It is argued that such discursive practices not only compromise public health but also indicate the press’s evasion of the responsibility to question and check the powerful in times of crises.

Keywords:

COVID-19 news report, evaluation, newspaper discourse, intertextuality, sourcing

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by funding of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (Grant number: 2024).

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