Philippine Free Higher Education News Reports: Corpus Based Comparative Analysis of Seven English National Newspapers

Abstract

Despite the heated debates on the implementation and its massive impact on the lives of Filipino people, only a dearth of research has been conducted to investigate the free college education project of the Duterte administration. Informed by corpus-based investigation of discourse, this paper critically compares news articles on the free college tuition discourse written by seven English online newspapers in the Philippines. The findings revealed that thematizing key public officials in the Manila Times, Philippine Daily Inquirer, and Philippine Star highlighted strong regard on the sources of information and the attribution of full authorial responsibility to information sources. CNN and Rappler’s focus on educational institution news themes depicts the thematization of the indispensable role of key agencies as implementers and venues for implementing the free college education project and the indispensable stance of these public higher education institutions. The Manila Bulletin and the government-owned Philippine News Agency’s strong rendition of free college tuition as a subject matter simply focused on state-of-affairs, where the absence of authorial sources may lower the credibility and trustworthiness of the news.