*Nursyamira Shaid, Muhammad Zaiamri Zainal Abidin, Fahizah Shamsuddin

Abstract:

The media’s approach of framing news can undoubtedly create certain effects on the emotions and sentiments of society. This often happens in the reporting of news related to environmental disasters, where most of the writing approach uses various framing methods to report the news effectively to the audience. In particular when most of the disaster news reporting is done using conflict framing as the dominant approach. Previous studies found that most news reporting that uses this conflict framing was found to contribute to the formation of negative sentiments among audience. Thus, this motivated the present study to analyse the framing of the online news coverage of the chemical spill in Sungai Kim Kim, Malaysia which is classified as a major disaster that threatened the safety of schoolchildren in Johor. To conduct the study, a quantitative content analysis was used to examine the framing methods used in its online news coverage, followed by a sentiment analysis on public comments on the Facebook news releases to identify the polarity of sentiments.

Keywords: Media framing, environmental framing, sentiment analysis