| 摘要: | Vietnam is a tropical country with a long history of suffering from powerful tropical storms, super typhoons almost every year. The preparedness, aftermath and response toward this kind of natural disaster have become the main concerns of not only Vietnam itself, but also other countries in the period of disaster. The news coverage of disaster has strong influences on people’s perception of disaster and furthermore, on the response of relief activities from individuals, organizations and officials. With different culture backgrounds, media systems, different kinds of events, the way disaster myths appear and result in influences is not the same. Particularly, in comparison Western countries, where disaster myths research has quite long history and already gained prominent achievement, Vietnam media system is considerably different. In addition, current studies of disaster myths often focus on traditional media, particularly print media. However, nowadays, online newspapers are the main medium for information, especially in disaster periods with a strong demand for constant updates. This research aims at analyzing English articles from the biggest online newspapers in Vietnam that have English version, which report the typhoon named Rammasun that lashed Vietnam in 2014, to examine the social construction of this disaster in Vietnam online newspapers’ reports. The research used discourse analysis with Fowler’s (1991) linguistic analytical tools to answer the research questions. By analyzing the headlines and the body text, it is found that the authority frame is a prominent feature of Vietnam online newspapers’ report of Rammasun. Although the news coverage in this case study features certain kinds disaster myths, such as the evacuation myth and the devastating image of the stricken-area; less positive images of the government and the society are posted at a considerably modest frequency. The media pays enormous attention to the preparation stage and the authorities’ response, to emphasize the active stance of the nation, the positive role and control status of the authorities, while the depiction of local people are mentioned in the news report at a relatively low frequency. These features have connections with the Vietnam media environment, which can be explained by Siebert’s (1956) Four theories of the Press model. |
