FRAMING OF CONTEMPORARY EDUCATION ISSUES IN MALAYSIA BY NEWS SOURCES AND CHINESE NEWSPAPERS

The development of education system is the benchmark of acountry’s development and in the case of malaysia, is also parallelwith the strengthening of unity in the country. the uphill taskof this country to become a developed nation is the educationpolicy regarding the medium of instruction for teaching andlearning in school. the juggle between upholding the nationallanguage, strengthening the global language capability and theretention of the unique mother tongue of every community in thiscountry is not easy. the 2003’s policy of teaching and learningscience and mathematics in english for all primary schools metstrong opposition from the chinese community. the malaysiangovernment finally accepted the proposal to teach the two subjectsin two languages in chinese schools. this empirical studyreflects on the reports by four chinese newspapers at that time tounderstand the frames used by the newspapers in reporting nationaleducation issues. both the media and news sources played a rolein framing the issue of education. five generic frames of semetko& valkenburg (2000) namely responsibility frame, conflictframe, morality frame, economic consequences frame and humaninterest frame, were used to quantitatively analyze the contentof four major local chinese newspapers in malaysia. a total of157 stories with 1,218 units of analysis were collected. the studyfound that the ruling coalition emphasizes on the responsibilityframe, while the editorial emphasizes human interest frame andthe opposition used the morality frame the most.