Theory of Media Viewpoint

Minister Chung Hong-Won made a statement to resign from the government. This kind of situation became highlight to mass media since this moment has newsworthiness and news value. Both national and International mass media published this news all together including The Korea Herald as the daily media in South Korea and The New York Times as the media outside South Korea. This study focuses on the analysis of the lexical items in the two news-articles that build the cohesion of each text. Then, after analyzing the cohesion, this study goes further on the media viewpoint of each news article seen from the cohesion. The example of the data of this study, in The Korea Herald, “Witnessing the sorrows of those who lost their loved ones and sadness and anger of the people, I felt the right thing for me to do was to take all responsibility as the prime minister.” The bold and underlined words in the sentence above are the sample of lexical items which contribute to the cohesion of the text as a form of reiteration. That is the sample of the data in this study.

B. Approach of the Study

This study uses Critical Discourse Analysis CDA as the approach to be applied in this study in order to answer the two problems formulated in this research. According to Ruth Wodak, CDA regards language as social practice and takes consideration of the context of language use to be crucial. Moreover, CDA takes a particular interest in the relation between language and ideology 2006: 2. Since this research also concerns with how the lexical choice in the news article can show how the language is ideological that it contains certain viewpoints in the context of South Korea‟s Prime Minister‟s resignation due to the government‟s bad handling on the ferry disaster, therefore, Critical Discourse Analysis CDA is considered relevant in this research.

C. Method of the Study

In this part, the writer explains the method used in this research, including the data collection and data analysis. This thesis uses a qualitative method in the analysis because this study is meant to prove how the analysis of linguistics details, especially the cohesion of the lexical items can show the viewpoint of the media in the issue of the resignation of South Korea‟s Prime Minister.

1. Data Collection

The writer took the data from two articles from two on-line newspapers; The Korea Herald and The New York Times. Since this research aims to know the viewpoints of the media about the issue that happened in South Korea about the resignation of its Prime Minister, the data was purposively taken from the media inside Korea and from outside of Korea. The data of this analysis were in form of news-article. The steps in collecting the data of this study was first, the writer chose two news-articles about the resignation of the Prime Minister of South Korea. Then second, the writer divided every news article into smaller subtopics according to the flow of the idea. Third, after dividing the news into some parts with each its own subtopics, the writer looked for the lexical items which were repeated and were associated one another. Those lexical items were the data which were analyzed later on the aspect of cohesive force.

2. Data Analysis

There were four steps in conducting this study. The first step was collecting the data. The data were in form of lexical items. The lexical items were collected according to their number of repetition and their association with the other lexical items. These lexical items were taken from the article as chains of cohesive keywords representing every smaller subtopic of the texts. Each of news articles has 7 subtopics. The 4 subtopics were same between The Korea Herald and The New York Times and the 3 subtopics of each news articles were different. The 4 similar subtopics between the two articles were: the offer of Prime Minister‟s resignation, the statements of the Prime Minister on his resignation, the governmental issue related to the resignation of the Prime Minister, and the criticism toward the government about their bad response to the disaster. The second step after collecting the lexical items, the writer analyzed the cohesion among the lexical item, and then related it with its grammatical cohesion including reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction. Then, the third step after defining the lexical and grammatical cohesion within the texts, the analysis went further into comparing the semantic features of the lexical items between The Korea Herald and The New York Times that were repeated and collocated according to the earlier analysis. Then the last step is drawing conclusion about how the viewpoint of each media were built from the comparison of the meaning of each text which was embodied by their cohesive force.