Abstract:
This research aims at investigating the representations of political protesters in political protests in Thailand during B.E. 2549 2557 in headline news in Thai newspapers from the approach of critical discourse analysis. It also aims to analyze the discursive practice and socio-cultural practice of media discourse in Thai daily newspapers reporting the political protests during this period. The data were gathered from six Thai daily newspapers including Thairath, Dailynews, Khaosod, Matichon, Manager, and Thai Post. The representations of three different groups of political protesters in three political protests, namely the B.E. 2549-2551 protest, the B.E. 2552-2553 protest, and the B.E. 2556 2557 protest, were analyzed. The analytical framework for study the representation of social actors (van Leeuwen, 1996) and the analysis of transitivity process (Halliday, 1985) as well as the intertextuality analysis are adopted for examining the representations of these political protesters. The analysis reveals that the representations of political protesters linguistically constructed in the headline news can be categorized into three groups. First is the neutral representations of the protesters as those who gathered in order to protest against the government. Next is the representations that legitimize the protesters as massive groups of people who unit to protest against the government, groups of people who acted legitimately against the authoritarian governments, victims who were attacked by the government and other groups, and peaceful protesters. Last is the representations that delegitimize the protesters as those who staged an uprising and caused chaos, those who are prone to use violent and force, those who acted against the law, those who were undemocratic, those who acted illegitimately, those who were untrustworthy or unrespectable, and those who belonged to the well-to-do class which did not represent the majority of the country. The stance of the newspaper and the different political situations are related to the different representations of each group of political protesters. The findings indicate that the representations of the same groups of political protesters were represented in the media in different ways, from different angles and by different linguistic strategies. These representations can either legitimize or delegitimize the represented political protesters which might affect the attitude of the news readers towards the protesters. The analysis also reveals that these representations are the result of the linguistic construction of the media with different political stances. However, the readers might sometimes not be aware of or recognize this process and therefore take the representations in the news as the only set of reality. The awareness or media discourse literacy will enable the readers to read critically and think carefully which may lead to the reduction of conflict in the society.