Analysis of an Article from Manilla

Using Fairclough's methods I decided to analyze a news article from The Manilla Times to see how similar the style of reporting is to the news that we are exposed to here. The article entitled "Problems With Tainted Milk May Persist" by Sammy Martin reports on the impact in the Phillipines that the Chinese milk tainted with the industrial chemical melamine has had.

http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2008/oct/08/yehey/top_stories/20081008top4.html

The article is mostly concerned with the procedures that are followed by the Phillipine's Bureau of Food and Drugs, claiming that they are not stringent enough to protect the country from incidents such as the industrially tainted milk. It goes on to explain how punishment will be handled for stores that are found to be breaking the ban on melamine-tainted Chinese import goods.

Breaking down this article with Fairclough's terms:

The text as it is a newspaper article would be considered a written non-spoken text.

Fairclough's idea of representation is seen in the information that is either included or excluded from the article. This article does not favorably represent the Chinese because it includes mentions of sickness caused in China while excluding information regarding any cases of illness that have been specifically reported in the Phillipines:
"Melamine, an industrial chemical that can cause kidney failure in humans, was blamed for causing the death of at least four infants in China and making ill more than 50,000 other children." This phrase excludes the location of the 50,000...it could be 50,000 worldwide or in China...
Another example includes a phrase that seems a bit out of place when read in the article as it mentions previous problems with Chinese products:
"Previously, Chinese-made candies were found to contain formaldehyde and Chinese-made toys were also found to have high lead content." This article mostly focuses on the problems that have come out of importing Chinese goods.

Obviously since there are restrictions to the size and scope of newspaper articles there are many presuppositions that this article makes. The first presupposition that this article makes is that China is primarily to blame for what is referred to as "The melamine scare," however it is not the Bureau of Food and Drugs is also blamed and the presupposition is that the government does not do enough to protect the general public. It also presupposes that the audience already knows a bit about the "melamine scare" because it only offers a few tidbits of information about the "scientific" nature of melamine. Some obvious presuppositions are that melamine and unregulated food are considered bad, and that regulation by the governement in this area is necessary.

An interesting difference that I noted in this article that might differ from news in the US is the presence of some items that would most likely be excluded in our print media. This article specifically notes two stores that were known to sell the tainted milk and gives their exact or near exact locations within Manilla. In our media the news might specifically name the stores but I doubt they would give a general address to the place.

The foregrounded element of this article is Bureau of Food and Drugs and its practices, while the sellers in the Phillipines and the Chinese milk manufacturers are backgrounded a bit. The mentioning of "civilians" is noticeably absent in this article. There are no opinions from the common person as is frequent in our news media. There are quotes from representatives in the government, however.

Events and Actions are both used in this article but actions seem more prevalent. A lot of the actors in the actions are nominalizations, however. The "melamine scare" is nominalized and most notably the term "the bureau" is used instead of putting blame on any individual supervisors within the Bureau of Food and Drugs.

I found it difficult to discuss a lot of these things without overlapping a lot, but hopefully the main idea of this article was conveyed well enough. Fairclough's ideas make for an interesting analysis, and I didn't really notice that many differences in this article from our own newspapers. Perhaps one major difference was that government officials actually offered quotes about how they were wrong about something (I feel like this is rare in our media ;) ):

"'Melamine is used for making plastics, we didn’t expect it to be part of ingredients of food products,' Cirunay [chief of the Product Services Division of the Bureau of Food and Drugs" said."