A corpus-based study of the representation of frequent social actors in anti-government protest news

The pro-democracy protest movement in Thailand in 2020 has generated considerable public interest. Media representations of protest movements contribute greatly to the perception of people towards any event or even persons. This explored the frequent social actors shared between the two sides of Thai press represented in Prachatai English Corpus (PCT) and Bangkok Post Corpus (BKP). All online news articles available were collected: the BKP corpus was composed of 363 news articles, and the PCT corpus contained 136 news articles. A collocational and concordance analysis of the frequent social actors—police, protester, student, and activist—were performed. The research employs Van Dijk’s (1998) ideological square to demonstrate the bias existing in media representations. The results revealed that both news agencies described police, protester, student, and activist differently. Police were regarded as violent actors in PCT, whereas the stance in BKP regarding police actions is less clear. The protesters were labelled as anti-government in BKP, in contrast to the portrayal by PCT, which viewed the movement as a struggle for democracy. The prominent group of student protesters was represented and personalized with their own titles in PCT as Bad Students, while in BKP Bad student was often used as an appositive. Activists were represented as a group calling for democratic principles, which applies to all movements, such as LGBT, especially in PCT, in line with the representation of the protest movement as a struggle for democracy.