Criminal or naive? news headlines on young offenders in the Japanese and Thai press

The discourse of mass media is considered as a site of power, a site of social struggle and a site where language is apparently transparent. Media institutions usually ‘naturalize’ things and disguise themselves to be as neutral as possible. They attempt to show that they reflect states of affairs disinterestedly and that they give the whole perception and arguments. In the recent studies of ‘sociopolitical’ discourse analysis where language, ideologies and power relations are closely examined, ‘youth’ has been viewed as one of the powerless and disregarded social groupings. This article takes critical approaches to discourse by extensively employing Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis and van Dijk’s sociocognitive approach as a theoretical framework to explore the relationships between language use, discourse practice and the sociocultural practice of news headlines on young offenders in Japanese and Thai press in order to provide an explanation of how media’s headlines on young offenders are produced, how they are interpreted, and how they reflect and manipulate the attitudes toward young offenders in Japanese and Thai society as a system of social domination. It can be remarked that language use in Thai newspapers has created a considerable negative viewpoint on young offenders by having strong connection with the social contexts and have psychological influence on the people in a society consequently while Japanese newspapers tend to focus on different issues and use more neutral linguistic strategies.