News Framing and Public Opinion: Study on Sin Chew Daily, Berita Harian and The Star on Sam Ke Ting's Basikal Lajak Case

Tan, Xin Lu (2022) News Framing and Public Opinion: Study on Sin Chew Daily, Berita Harian and The Star on Sam Ke Ting's Basikal Lajak Case. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University of Management and Technology.

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Abstract

Sam Ke Ting’s basikal lajak case happened in 2017 in which a gang of Mat Lajak was knocked by Sam Ke Ting at highway in the early morning and eight of them died. She was found guilty in 2022 by the High Court after being acquitted two times by the Magistrate. The perpetrator, Sam Ke Ting is Chinese and the dead are Malays. Hence, this research intends to study the news framing applied by Sin Chew Daily, Berita Harian and The Star which serve different communities due to their languages and the influence of news framing on public opinion. This research was supported by framing theory to identify the news frames applied by newspapers in different languages and the resulting public opinion. Content analysis was used to study three types of content regarding the verdict of the case reported by the three newspapers. The researcher analysed the public opinion through Facebook comments under the news posts. The research found that the newspapers mainly applied attribution of responsibility frame, human interest frame and preventable framing but with different focuses. News framing of Berita Harian more significantly influenced its readers compared to readers of Sin Chew Daily and The Star. Besides, news framing is not as powerful as suggested by previous scholars. This research shows that current readers are active audiences who are not completely influenced by the framing of newspapers, and they have their own judgement when analysing the case