FRAMING OF CONTEMPORARY EDUCATION ISSUES IN MALAYSIA BY NEWS SOURCES AND CHINESE NEWSPAPERS

The development of education system is the benchmark of a country’s development and in the case of Malaysia, is also parallel with the strengthening of unity in the country. The uphill task of this country to become a developed nation is the education policy regarding the medium of instruction for teaching and learning in school. The juggle between upholding the national language, strengthening the global language capability and the retention of the unique mother tongue of every community in this country is not easy. The 2003’s policy of teaching and learning Science and Mathematics in English for all primary schools met strong opposition from the Chinese community. The Malaysian government finally accepted the proposal to teach the two subjects in two languages in Chinese schools. This empirical study reflects on the reports by four Chinese newspapers at that time to understand the frames used by the newspapers in reporting national education issues. Both the media and news sources played a role in framing the issue of education. Five generic frames of Semetko & Valkenburg (2000) namely responsibility frame, conflict frame, morality frame, economic consequences frame and human interest frame, were used to quantitatively analyze the content of four major local Chinese newspapers in Malaysia. A total of 157 stories with 1,218 units of analysis were collected. The study found that the ruling coalition emphasizes on the responsibility frame, while the editorial emphasizes human interest frame and the opposition used the morality frame the most.