Between Us and Them: Examining The Indigenous People of Malaysia as Represented in The Mainstream News Media

Abstract

Examining the linguistic representation of a minority group using computer-assisted method is the heart of this study. In particular, we are interested in investigating how the indigenous people of Malaysia or Orang Asli are being represented by the news media in Malaysia as we believe that mass media play a huge role in curating the image of a group and affecting perception of readers about that group. It affects how they are perceived by the mainstream community. Using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, a 700,000-word corpus was examined focusing on grammatical words. Through the analysis, we found that the Orang Asli are consistently being framed as a helpless group who are frequently in need of assistance. Often, they are positioned as passive recipients of things from more dominant groups like volunteers and governments. These consistent negative and helpless images of the Orang Asli, we believe will be detrimental to the overall perception of society towards them which may later affect their social standing in the Malaysian community. We believe that stories about orang Asli need to be curated in a more positive manner thus, promoting them as active members of the society who can contribute to the development of the nation.