Directrices

This section discusses the implications of my chosen media outlets and the relevance of my chosen sampling strategy. It is important to acknowledge how my decision to learn the Malay

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language and my subsequent experiences of living and studying in UKM were central to the formulation of my methodological framework. This reflected an abductive approach, whereby the research design was not clear at the outset but emerged alongside the researcher’s

progressive understanding of their research matter, based on a reflexive attitude that looked forwards and backwards throughout the research process. Between September 2013 and March 2014 I undertook an intensive Malay language course which ensured my knowledge of Malay was sufficient to read Malay-language material. This I believed would help enhance my credibility as a researcher of Malaysian culture and politics. As the national language, understanding Malay is central to understanding national political discourse, and this influenced my decision to learn Malay over the other primary ‘ethnic’ languages, Mandarin and Tamil. Whereas modern Malay utilises a Romanised alphabet, Mandarin and Tamil are vastly more challenging for a western researcher to learn and apply, thus to reach a sufficient level within the time constraints of the PhD. Out of reading, writing, speaking and listening, reading Malay is the easiest form of learning for foreign-language beginners, firstly because it only requires translating the text in front of you and secondly because it avoids the need to master phonetic differences and correct intonation (necessitated in speaking and listening).

This is why print media, and not radio or television, are being studied. The latter are more ephemeral and harder to translate for Malay-language beginners, contrary to the permanence of written text. At UKM I not only studied the Malay language but also the cultural and historical foundations of that language. Albeit no longer the ‘racy idiom of peasants’ (King 1986, p.ix), the roots of the Malay language lie in the historical existence of the rural masses, spoken through performances of Malay culture like pantun (traditional Malay poems) and peribahasa (Malay proverbs/idioms) common to all members of the community. Spoken Malay was very colourful, informal and dialects varied from region to region, drawing from different historical experience. In contrast, standardised Malay is much younger than its counterpart. Standardised Malay was required for written communication, and was introduced in the late colonial period for a variety of reasons, including the need for Britain to centralise its administrative practices and begin to educate citizens under a modern curriculum. For the latter, a set of uniform principles were needed to teach the Malay language to the students.

One difficult example was how to understand the use of affixes in verb formations (for in spoken Malay verbs were commonly used in stand-alone form). Writing in 1971, Omar observed that ‘[a] great majority of the native speakers of Malay have never been able to master the use of certain affixes’ (p.78). This more modern strand of the language is ‘used for all purposes – science as well as literature, economics as well as agriculture’ (King 1986, p.ix). It is this strand which is found ‘in newspapers, magazines, modern novels and short

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stories, government reports, and official and commercial correspondence of all kinds’ (ibid, p.viii). Albeit more extensive, this form is easier to translate because of the specificity through which different affixes delineate different meanings. In contrast, informal, spoken varieties of Malay are more fluid, requiring a trained linguist to appreciate their cultural and linguistic significance.

Because of the party-political context of my research I sought to represent the

government/opposition antagonism through the two media outlets most closely associated with those respective political standpoints. Although naturally a wide array of Malaysian media was available for analysis, my Malay language focus precluded the possibility of studying pro-establishment Mandarin or Tamil presses. Utusan is among the most notorious of the pro-establishment papers, known for its unrelenting support of the administration, hence reflected the most suitable Malay-language media choice. Of all the potential opposition media outlets, Malaysiakini is the most famous and most oppositional; as

explained in Chapter 3 its genealogy lies in the oppositional reform movement which emerged in 1998. My experiences of university culture strongly influenced this decision to conduct a comparative study of pro-government and opposition media. Established in 1970, UKM was born from resurgent nationalist ambitions to preserve the Malay language that peaked after the Malay-Chinese riots. UKM instructs in Malay and is one of five research universities in the country. Utusan and UKM are thus (loosely) connected through their pro-government

position and championing of language nationalism. In contrast, most of my friends on campus supported different opposition parties. My experiences of this young and politicised student cohort, at university just one hour’s drive from the capital Kuala Lumpur, connected with Malaysiakini’s politicised, urban and more youthful readership. From a practical aspect, the accessibility of the online Utusan and Malaysiakini archives (searchable by date and/or keyword) for westerners also influenced their selection. Notably, Malaysiakini’s archive only starts from May 2001, and having contacted Malaysiakini staff I was informed that a server fire had destroyed older files. Subsequently I could not analyse media articles from the 1999 election, where Malaysiakini made its first and indelible impact.

The benefits of theoretical sampling

Given my ethnographic experiences of living and studying in Malaysia, I adopted a theoretical sampling approach, which is appropriate for someone with prior knowledge of their case study. In theoretical sampling the researcher is central to the sampling process, using prior field experience to inform data collection (Martela 2011, p.1). Theoretical

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sampling also provided an effective means of analysing articles with inherent connections to my theoretical and methodological commitments. For my sampling method I adapted the approach outlined by Altheide and Schneider (1996). This was a gradual process, initiating with some extensive reading of Utusan and Malaysiakini articles from each election. The time-frame chosen for this reading was from the date Malaysia’s parliament was dissolved until two weeks after the election had finished. From this preliminary reading, recurring discourses were identified and expanded into broader discursive categories (Figure 5) within which discussion of certain topics fell. The content of these categories was constantly refined according to the emerging understanding of the case study, and Table 2 shows the final outcome.

Figure 5: Discourses in the Malaysian media

Using this table as a framework, a list of keywords was developed to guide data collection (see Altheide and Schneider 1996), enabling me to collect articles based on their topical relevance to those discourses (incorporating news reports, opinion pieces and letters to the editor). After this broad data set was collected, it was refined through constant comparisons between different articles. Throughout this process, attention was drawn to key electoral events and central media commentaries, and spotlighting these contributed to a progressively selective focus on relevant people, groups and parties defining each election. In the final sample, each article emphasised aspects or themes of Malaysia’s racialised discourse that were important to answering the research questions. Articles were also purposively selected based on their title, for instance in the 2013 election the Utusan article ‘Apa lagi Cina mahu?’

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(What more do the Chinese want?) had clear connotations concerning the problematic Malay/Chinese relationship and could not be ignored within the research remit. 150 articles were sampled overall (50 for each election, 25 for each media outlet).

Ethnic/racial

Table 2: Media topics of discussion according to discursive category

Having obtained those samples, NVivo was used to code the media articles. This entailed reading each article and coding different sections of those articles against the aforementioned discursive categories and media topics. Consider, for example, this sentence taken from the article ‘An open letter to non-Malays’, written by former PKR Secretary-General, Salehuddin Hashim after the 2004 election:

It is part of the process of philosophical reassessment that we need to go through in order for us to look to the future with dignity and earn the mutual respect of fellow Malaysians.

Hashim was discussing the importance of Malay introspection, and so the sentence was coded to Bangsa Melayu/‘The Malays’. However, the statement’s broader context related to the question of hudud law in Malaysia, and so was also coded to Hudud and syariah law.

Moreover, ‘earn the mutual respect of fellow Malaysians’ was coded to

Non-Malays/minorities. Albeit not as labour-intensive as quantitative coding, this process nonetheless achieved its central objective, to form links between different articles, thus providing the platform for successive stages of discursive analysis.

In theoretical sampling, the sampling and analysis stages are not discreet processes but inherently interconnected throughout the research; a fluid, iterative, highly reflexive process,

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involving constant comparison between concepts, data and analysis (Wodak 2004, p.200). In this method, the researcher moves back and forth between their ‘preunderstanding’ of subject matter, various theoretical perspectives and the data itself, to provide ‘the best possible yet fallible explanation’ for the data (Martela 2011, p.1, my emphasis). This preunderstanding –

‘our concepts, beliefs and theories’ – is in interplay with the data at all times, and it is important not to deny our experience but to embrace it and help it to mould the analytical process (ibid, p.12). Consequently, data is never raw but interpreted from the outset (ibid, p.9). Bucholtz (2001, p.168) concedes that CDA too often

...yields findings that can always be predicted in advance, once the basic power relations have been sketched out. It is too rarely surprising, too rarely sensitive to subtlety, complexity, or

contradiction.

But it is because of this ‘predictability’ that we must unpack these representations. Moreover, the idea that CDA merely affirms the relationship between language and power in society, neglects the novelty and creativity of the researcher’s interpretation of the data (albeit one consistent with their broader understanding of the research context) (Martela 2011, p.7). As Milner (1995, p.5) states, ‘[i]nterrogating texts...can thus give greater scope, greater free play, to the expression of autonomous perspectives.’ Overall I sought to recreate the past through constructing media narratives that evoked the unique political atmosphere of those elections. I have also relied heavily on direct quotes, which lets the text, and not me, do the talking.

Nevertheless, Wicks and Freeman (1998) note the need ‘to engage in discussion about which purposes are advanced and why’ (in Martela 2011, p.5). The researcher’s own worldview and value judgments influence their choices concerning what is relevant to the research design:

‘what to include and exclude in the scope of our fieldwork, analysis and writing’ (Bucholtz 2001, p.166).