Media Presentations of Vietnam’s Cybersecurity Law: A Comparative Approach with Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis

The study uses corpus-based critical discourse analysis to examine how Vietnam’s state-sponsored media and foreign media differently frame and position cybersecurity issues and Vietnam’s Cybersecurity Law through topic modeling, bigram and trigram collocation, and concordance analyses. The findings show that Vietnam’s national media tend to justify the law by emphasizing human-related cyber threats, legitimizing national security, and delegitimizing hostile media and reactionary forces that oppose the law. In stark contrast with the security-as-an-ideology discourse, world-known media provide real-life events regarding human rights violations in the country to question and confront the legitimacy of the law. Competition and tension in discourses with back-and-forth responses between the two media are also analyzed.