The national day of Australia, officially referred to as Australia Day, can be seen as a celebration of Australian culture or as a symbol of colonialism. Previous research shows that how newspapers frame events can impact the readers’ understanding of how reality is represented (Baker et al., 2013). Therefore, this thesis investigates how Australia Day is framed in Australian news articles and whether the framing of Australia Day differs in left- and right-leaning newspapers. The data consists of two corpora of news articles about Australia Day published in left- and right-leaning newspapers between 2018 and 2022. These corpora were analysed from a Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) perspective. The results indicate that the national day is framed as a controversial day in both right- and left-leaning newspapers, most saliently referred to as Australia Day or Invasion Day. In right-leaning newspapers, Australia Day celebrations are framed as positive, while anti-Australia Day protests and the use of the term Invasion Day are portrayed as negative. Furthermore, in right-leaning newspapers, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples are reported to have more important priorities than changing the date for Australia Day. In contrast, the left-leaning newspapers are more prone to frame the national day as disrespectful towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples and signal that a potential future change of date is positive. Overall, this study suggests that the political orientation of the newspaper can impact how the national day is framed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:du-41769 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Tamm, Erica |
| Publisher | Högskolan Dalarna, Institutionen för språk, litteratur och lärande |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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