A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Web News About Autism

This research uses a synergy of corpus methods and critical discourse analysis to reveal the similarities,differences and potential social influences of online reports about autism in 20 English-speaking countries / regions over the past decade(2010-2019).The corpus of news on web developed by the Birmingham Young University(the BYU-NOW corpus)serves as a source of online reports.In order to examine the impact of income levels on news reports,the 20 countries / regions are divided into high-income countries/regions(HI)and low(er)or middle-income countries/regions(LMI).Results show that general patterns of news reports about autism in the HI and the LMI are the same.The observed shared patterns are:(1)frequency of reports has declined over the past decade despite a slight increase in recent years,and reports are increasingly congregated in April;(2)the frequency of reports about autistic children is higher than that of autistic adults;(3)the frequency of reports about male autistics is higher than that of female autistics;(4)mothers with autistic children are more frequently mentioned in news reports than fathers.The difference between the two group of countries/regions is that some shared patterns are more obvious in the HI or the LMI.Compared with the LMI,the frequency of reports is higher,the decrease in frequency of reports is smaller and the share of reports in April is smaller,the frequencies of autistic children and autistic females are lower while frequencies of autistic adults and autistic males are higher in the HI.These biases observed in news reports may affect public's perceptions of autism:(1)the decline in report frequency will leave autism and autistics getting ignored by the society;(2)the lack of report about autistic adults will make the public mistakenly believe that autism can be cured instead of a lifetime disorder;(3)insufficient reports of female autistics will make girls being ignored and under-diagnosed;(4)reports ofparents pay special attention to mothers of autistics while barely mention their fathers,indicating that mothers are expected to take the care-taking role,making mothers more likely to be over-stressed.The innovation point of this research lies in its interdisciplinarity and novelty.Previous studies on the image of autism in media discourse mostly come from the content analysis of communication studies.This research attempts to bring a new dimension to this topic by applying the linguistic method and theory.Although autism is a global public health problem,few international studies touch upon the images of autism constructed by news discourses.This research can be viewed as the first one to address this field.