Modeling the audience’s perception of security in media discourse

Combining the concepts of securitization with a discourse analytic approach, the study presents an attempt to investigate how the audience’s perception toward an unconventional security issue has been shaped in media context. As a case study, this paper delves into the portrayal of the Confucius Institute in the U.S. media discourse. By analyzing the coverage of the Confucius Institute in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal from 2004 to 2022, it aims to unpack the narratives and representations surrounding this institution. With a particular focus on how the use of language shapes the audience’s perception and subsequently influences their cognition in the context of the securitization of Confucius Institutes, a select sample of texts from the corpus was collected for coded qualitative analysis to allow for a deeper understanding of how the media constructs and disseminates information about the Confucius Institute. The findings turn out that American media actors deliver a bottom-up securitizing move by interacting with socio-political value positions on Confucius Institutes in the United States, grounding a cognitive construction of security threat into shaping public emotive perceptual experience with dialogically patterned linguistic configurations.