The Proclamation of Pandemic Covid-19 Emergency: An Analysis of Verbal Processes in Aswaq News Report

The pandemic Covid-19 which emerged in late 2019 has grab a lot of attention and up until now we still face the impact of this deadly widely spread disease. Mass media, online news providers in particular, have played a significant role in providing information associated with the pandemic to the audience almost instantly. This paper aims to examine the news reports surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic by the Arabic-language news portal 'Aswaq' (aswaqpress.com) from January to August 2021. Aswaq news portal, acts as a bridge of news and information between Malaysia and the Arab world, hence provides news on Malaysia to the Arab audience globally. The focus of the study is on the verbal processes which concern on the process of saying. This study will also dissect the strategies used by the Aswaq in processing and reporting using verbal processes in their news reports. Next, the analysis gives an overview of the narrative of news related to the Covid-19 served to the targeted readers. The research method is qualitative by using the textual-oriented Critical Discourse Analysis approach advocated by Norman Fairclough (1992). The results of the qualitative analysis will be backed by the statistical data generated by the Corpus Linguistic analysis software 'AntConc' for the Windows 11 system version 4.3.1 (2024). The result shows that Aswaq strategically used the verbal processes in the news report surrounding the pandemic Covid-19 in Malaysia. Although the data indicated that there is no ‘clear cut’ or ‘a consistent’ approach of taking side with any of the sayer group either the antagonist (opposition) or the protagonist (government), it is revealed that the positive verbal processes were more frequently associated with the sayer from the protagonist group. While the negative verbal processes were more frequently attached to the antagonist. At the end of the paper, suggestions and solutions will be presented for related studies in the future.