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Abstract

This study examined the Vietnamese online news media discourse of a child abuse incident at a private autism center. Using framing analysis, the study found the news media frame the child abuse dominantly as a professional misconduct. The study detailed how the media’s blame was directed to the abusive staff and the uninformed parents, not institutional governance and policy loopholes. The study argued that the Vietnamese media focused on constructing ideologies of parental responsibilization and autonomous citizenship rather than state authorities’ accountability.

Keywords

Authoritarian political economy autism child abuse framing analysis Vietnamese online news media

Introduction

On 21 July 2014, in Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam, the leading online news outlet Thanhnien.vn broke the story of teachers and nannies with no proper qualifications and accreditations at Anh Vương autism center beating autistic students with metal rods and big sticks in an intimidating video report titled, Dạy trẻ tự kỷ bằng … khúc cây [Teaching autistic children with … logs] (Ngọc, 2014). As Thanhnien.com is one of the most popular and progressive media houses in Vietnam (Vu et al., 2017), the story quickly gathered public attention. The public was shocked, and the incident was discussed extensively on social media.

Thanhnien.com then published 15 other follow-up stories during the latter half of July 2014. The incident attracted large online media coverage in Vietnam, with a total of 50 original online news stories, and hundreds of republished articles by various online news aggregation outlets in the country referring to the incident. This incident represented a problem that brought to fore the power dynamic between state officers, service providers, lay citizens, and news media agencies. The conflict also provided a window to observe how the structural system in power dealt with inequality, exclusion, conflict, and violence (Parlevliet, 2018). In other words, the incident reveals how news media in Vietnam might frame responsibilities and power between citizens and an authoritarian state in an injustice and violence situation. As such, this study aims to answer the questions how and why the Vietnamese media framed a child abuse incident, so as to understand how stakeholders defined problems, attributed responsibilities, enacted power, and compromised with injustice (Entman, 1993). The study focuses on understanding the ideological implication, to unveil the accountability issues behind the blame game in the media stories, rather than deliberately highlighting the quantitative significance of each frame.

The article would start by projecting the theoretical and methodological frameworks, then, it would discuss the political economy of Vietnam and its news media system to set the canvas for understanding the media framing practice in the case study. After the interpretive framing analysis, the implications would be debated in the discussion section. Contributions and recommendations for future research would be made in the conclusion.

Theoretical framework and methodology

This study spanned a theoretical bridge between a critical realism and a social constructionism framework. The article also built on qualitative framing analysis, with an inductive and interpretive approach based on the grounded theory.

The article pursued the epistemology that only if we understand the structures that generate events or discourses, can we understand and change social reality Bhaskar (2011). Critical realism acknowledges the necessity of observation of events or phenomena, but science cannot be “reduced to observation of phenomena at the empirical level” (Danermark et al., 2005, p. 22). The generative mechanisms constituting social reality need to be unveiled through the conceptualization and practical process of the social sciences (Bhaskar, 2011, p. 2). When agents reproduce or transform structures in their social activity, they at the same time, potentially regenerate “structures of power which may involve alienation, domination and oppression” (Bhaskar, 2011, p. 5). Therefore, critical realists seek to pursue emancipation as “a process of structural transformation—as a transformation in structures rather than a marginal adjustment of states of affairs and as a transformation to other (needed, wanted and empowering) structures rather than to a realm which magically escapes determination” (Bhaskar, 2011, p. 145).This emphasis on social structures is important in pointing out social wrongs, explaining them, and proposing recommendations for systemic change.

This study also drew on the premise that “[b]ecause texts are both socially structuring and socially-structured,” analysts have to unveil not only how texts construct meanings and thereby contribute to constructing social structure but also how “the production of meaning is itself constrained by emergent, non-semiotic features of social structure” (Fairclough et al., 2004, p. 27). Within a critical realism framework, news media are understood as operating under external constraining factors, such as government regulations, economic and logistical practice, media ownership, as well as internal factors such as journalists’ ideologies and professionalism (Lau, 2004). However, social structures are not controlling people unilaterally; they need to mobilize and negotiate with agents’ conceptions to reach a compromise (Cruickshank, 2012, p. 80). This is where human agency comes into play.

Critical realism affirms the need for researchers to critically and politically push for media practitioners’ ethical accountability and for the professional adequacy of their representations (Wright, 2011, p. 167). This study was also concerned with “the way in which [the news] may distort, misrepresent and select or affect reality” (Beharrell & Hoggart, 1976, p. 20). Consequently, the study aimed to establish the “recursive links between structure and agency, subjectivity and reality” (Wright, 2011, p. 167). Thus, this article built on the representation of a child abuse incident in the media discourse as a case study to signify the importance of the cultural political economy structures to explain the reality.

Methodologically, this study used qualitative framing analysis to investigate how the online news media houses defined the problems, sought to identify the causes, made moral judgments, attributed responsibilities, and pursued solutions, as outlined by Entman (1991) in media framing practice. Communicators use frames as organizing principles that have been formed and maintained in a particular culture over time in order to “work symbolically to meaningfully structure the social world” (Reese, 2001, p. 11). As such, frames operate like structures that actively connect related ideas in their net, while meaning can be embedded in the news, texts, communication, and experience (Reese, 2007, p. 150).

Framing analysis was relevant for this study because frames influence people’s perception of the matters at hand and framing is central “in the exertion of political power” (Entman, 1993, p. 55). This study aimed to point out how the media frame an issue while making it salient can set the agenda for the audience about “what to think about” and “how to think about it” (McCombs & Shaw, 1993, p. 63).

Media scholars have pointed out how journalists often mobilizes episodic verses thematic frames with the focus on either the individual or societal factors and actors (Iyengar, 1996), which carry ideological implications and responsibility attribution (Bie & Tang, 2015). The public have the tendency to simplify political issues by assigning responsibility to particular actors (Iyengar, 1991). When the media present an issue as an individual story, or within the episodic frame, instead of presenting an issue as a social matter, the media are less likely to hold government officials and institutions accountable for dealing with the problems. As such, news framing can affect the public’s perception about who should solve social problems, and how they should do so.

When conducting framing analysis, this study also drew on the grounded theory which inductively discovers the textual patterns in the data and privileges context over a priori academic preconception (Walsh et al., 2015). The emergent theory is inductively conceptualized, rather than deductively proven (Glaser, 1978, pp. 37–44). A bigger priority is given to explicating a social practice rather than creating theories that generate hypotheses and lay the ground for predictions (Charmaz, 1995).

Existing studies of media framing presented a gap in the connection between the macro contextual factors shaping a country’s culture with the more particular ways the national media frame certain issues (Vu et al., 2019). In this study, when structural factors in the cultural political economy were incorporated into framing analysis, it was possible to explain how the framing strategies influence the definition of problems and attribution of responsibilities. Thus, the study could also explain how the media and stakeholders normalize the injustice that abused children and their families have to live with.

The political economy of Vietnam and its news media

To understand the media discourse in Vietnam, it is essential to understand the country’s political economy and its media system. Like its role model China, Vietnam is developing under a hybrid mechanism, where the Communist Party still holds the supreme power in an authoritarian political system, while the economy has been adopting neoliberalized logics, marketization, and privatization in many aspects (Schwenkel & Leshkowich, 2012). However, most of the media outlets are still owned by state agencies and defined as their mouthpiece (Sanko, 2016; Thiem, 2016). Editors-in-chief and key personnel are still appointed by the Central Department of Ideology and Propaganda, while media outlets have to commercialize to keep up with the market rationality. Online news media are under constant pressure competing for viewership to appeal to advertisers. Approximately, 59% and 29% of the digital advertising spending in Vietnam is directed toward Facebook and Google, respectively, while Vietnamese online media only occupy 10% of market share in digital advertising, making competition even stiffer (GroupM, 2020). Many media outlets go after sensationalization and tabloidization to appeal to the audience (T. T. T. Nguyen, 2013). Vietnam is often placed near the bottom of the international rankings in press freedom, near China, Iran, and North Korea (Reporters Without Borders, 2021). But civic issues like education and child abuses are often discussed openly because interestingly these matters are not considered political taboos.

Vietnam is struggling to deal with child abuse problems (Tran et al., 2017), even though it was the second country in the world to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990. The government passed laws to protect the rights of the child, including the Law on Children 2016; the Education Law 2019 and the Law on Persons with Disabilities 2010, among others, but child abuse remains a prevalent problem (Tran et al., 2017). A survey found that 40% of teachers at four schools in Hanoi, the capital city of Vietnam, believe that corporal punishment worked well to train students to follow rules, adopt good behavior, and study harder (CSAGA, as cited in Loan et al., 2018). Recently, researchers attempted to investigate child abuse in Vietnam from a communication perspective (Duong et al., 2019), but no study has considered how Vietnamese media frame the child abuse problem. This study provides an analysis of the media culture in a Communist country with an authoritarian media control system but a neoliberalized media market, to unfold institutional reasons explaining the persistence of child abuse problem in Vietnam.

Data collection and framing analysis

Data were collected first by using Google advanced search in all registered electronic newspapers and news aggregation websites. Two keywords “Anh Vương,” [the center’s name] and “tự kỷ,” [autism/autistic] were used in the Google advanced search. A total of 50 articles with 47,000 words were collected after repeated and republished articles were weaned out and coverage by non-journalistic websites was excluded.

The first round of reading helped the researcher familiarize with the data. In the second round, the content at paragraph levels of all the 50 articles was then coded into a code book. This open coding mainly aimed at inductively identifying the major themes, and the codes emerged in the process of engaging with the data, rather than fitting data into prescribed categories (Charmaz, 1995). When a paragraph presented a certain theme, they were marked with a matching color, and one code was recorded in the relevant code column. In the third round of focused coding, codes with similar themes were subsumed and conceptualized into frames that made analytical sense with overriding significance (Charmaz, 1995). The child abuse incident was reported with the following frames: (1) a professional misconduct and unethical business practice; (2) personal human conflicts, with sensational reaction from families and society; (3) the unmet needs in services for students with autism; (4) the dysfunctional administration of the local state agencies in monitoring autism and child care centers; and (5) the call for a bigger policy solution to address the issues of child abuse and services for children with autism, whereas (1) was the most dominant frame and (5) was the most minor frame.

Overall, these frames were distinctive in the way the authors looked at the incident at either episodic, short-term and event-based approach, or thematic, long-term, macro- and policy-based orientation, with implicit or explicit responsibility attribution. These five frames share common themes with the broad frames that have been identified by other studies such as human interest frame, service availability and quality, the science frame, and social policy frame in the matters of maltreatment of children with autism elsewhere (Bie & Tang, 2015; Jones & Harwood, 2009; McKeever, 2012).

What was the problem and who was responsible?

The literature on accountability establishes that accountability works to ensure “juridical values of fairness, rationality and legality” (Scott, 2000, p. 42). The embryonic development of accountability norms in Vietnam construes “the reconfiguration of authoritarianism in a bold and not-unproblematic process of administrative decentralization” (Vasavakul, 2014, p. 42), but it has not demonstrated a clear orientation toward democratic norms and practices.

In its first report that uncovered the child abuse incident, Dạy trẻ tự kỷ bằng … khúc cây [Teaching autistic children with … a tree stick] (Ngọc, 2014), Thanhnien.vn bundled the video with a text article and photos to illustrate the violence. The article framed the incident mainly as professional misconduct and unethical business practice. Below were the most intimidating scenes described in the text:

Ms. Lam shouted and held Sang’s head before banging the latter’s head onto the iron gate, then left Sang alone.

Ms. Trúc grabbed Bằng’s hair and shirt, then dragged him to the room on the ground floor, while pinching his ears and head. Afterward, this staff wrestled him to the floor and sit on him.

Phi Bằng and Danh Phương were two victims who were “penis crushed” to the extent their skin pealed off and needed to apply medicine. (Ngọc, 2014)

Throughout the first article with over 1000 words long, reporter Lam Ngọc described such scenes continuously, sentences after sentences, and paragraphs after paragraphs. The verbs such as đập [bang], đánh [beat], nắm [grab], kéo/lôi [drag], nhéo [pinch], bóp [crush], and vật [wrestle] were used frequently and reflected the cruelty of the abusers. The students were seen as helpless objects and victims, especially in passive voice sentences.

In 2 minutes and 38 seconds, the video showed multiple sequences of violence by different staff members, with fast cuts, short sequences, shaking angles, poor light, and lots of screaming and crying. The most intimidating scene in the video might be the one in which a staff member, Trúc, in a sitting position, smiled and crushed the penis of a boy. Trúc seemed to be turning from the boy and looking to an audience, with a very comfortable broad laugh, as if she was showing other people how much fun she was having by casually torturing the child. In the video, Trúc’s laugh could be heard out loud, together with others’ laughter. With all the details above, this article reported the child abuse incident dominantly with the professional misconduct frame. The video, the text, and the photos worked together to reflect the humiliating brutality of the staff and the suffering of the students at individual levels.

From a different angle, the article Bàng hoàng những bảo mẫu dạy trẻ tự kỷ bằng bạo lực [Stunned by nannies teaching autistic children with violence] (Thơ Trịnh et al., 2014) blamed the parents of the victims. This article was published on 28 July 2014, by Doisongphapluat.com . Given its name Life and Law, and its affiliation with the Vietnam Association of Lawyers, Doisongphapluat.vn did not stand on legislative ground to investigate the case, but on drama and blames instead. The article started with this lead:

[It is] an anguish when parents “send eggs to the crows,” making the miserable children bounded with diseases suffer tolls of violence by inhumane nannies. [Because of the] lack of specialized schools for autistic children, many parents resign themselves to commend their children to childcare centers without licenses or credentials. (Thơ Trịnh et al., 2014)

The article started out by blaming parents, using the metaphor “send eggs to the crows” to describe how parents consigned their powerless children to nasty people, when they should know that their children would surely be harmed. The authors pointed out the problem of “lack of specialized schools for autistic children,” but did not pursue the story in that direction, instead, they mainly projected negative connotation onto the parents who had limited choice but to send their children to this child care and boarding center. The word phó thác was translated as [leave/commend], with a connotation of leaving someone at the mercy and power of someone else, without checks and verification. Implicitly, the cause of the problem was because parents commissioned their children to a bad child care center, with moral judgment centered on the parents. The implication was service users had to be responsible for their buying decisions in the market and if they made a bad choice, they would be the one to be blamed first. Only after blaming the parents, the article summarized what happened at the center where the teachers used such “tricks” as grabbing the children’s necks, dragging them to the dining tables, and using wood or iron rods and plastic sticks to beat and threaten them so that the children would follow their instructions in every meal.

The article also conveyed the parents and families’ reactions to the abuse in five long paragraphs, but because the blame of “send[ing] eggs to the crow” was already slammed on the parents’ right in the lead of the article, their reactions only reinforced the label that they were uninformed care givers. The sequence of what contents were presented first, with more space and details contributed to what theme was made “salient” (Entman, 1993) and what frames were dominant in the story.

Only in paragraph 9 of the article was the Vice Deputy Director of Ho Chi Minh City Department of Education and Training, Trần Thị Kim Thanh, quoted:

Ms. Thanh confirmed “Anh Vương is not an autism school, but a limited company. In its license, this entity is registered to care for the elderly with disabilities, it does not have the function to care for autistic children.” (Thơ Trịnh et al., 2014)

When Thanh stated that Anh Vương was not registered as an autism school, but a company to care for the elderly with disabilities, she implied that it was not in the professional territory of her education administration. This was a way to deny the responsibility of the education administration for the incident at a business that was not officially registered as an education entity, regardless of its actual operation. The responsibility was then pushed to the lower level, with the lessons for the district and ward level to learn, not for her Department at the city level to take (Thanh, as cited in Thơ Trịnh et al., 2014). Thanh confirmed her Department would work with other entities to “categorize the children” to know where to send them afterwards. This language of categorization viewed individuals as stigmatized objects that may be easily grouped into boxes (Nguyen, 2015). The solutions here were also reactive and short term, without a long-term governance solution to address the issues at its roots. Overall, this article used a mix of four frames. However, blaming the parents of the abused children contradicts to pointing out the service shortage and local education administration loophole.

Intertextually, Thanh was also quoted by other media outlets with the same message. But none of the media house pointed out the implication of her words in distancing her administration from direct accountability to the incident. In this case, the media practice of relying on elite sources enabled the powerful people to promote a certain perspective to the wider public and influence the discourse in the way that benefited those who had better access to the media (Hall et al., 1978).

In a similar tone, Thanhnien.vn published a commentary titled Nuôi con tự kỷ, phải tìm thông tin từ cộng đồng [Raising autistic children, you have to look for information from the community] on 23 July 2014 written by Ami Nguyễn (2014), a contributor in Hồ Chí Minh City. The writer questioned the neglect of the People’s Committee of Ward 15, People’s Committee of Tân Bình district, and the Division of Education and Training. But then, paradoxically, this writer turned to suggest:

It is what it is, the strict and clear management of the state authority and the education system is limited, the parents […] should “save your own children” first, like “consumers have to be smart […] in a market that is less and less safe.” (Nguyễn, 2014)

The term thôi thì [it is what it is] in Vietnamese is a colloquial phrase, showing a submissive, helpless attitude that the speakers often utter when they believe they do not have a good choice. The article viewed education and child care as a market, so if you did not “save your own children” by being intelligent consumers, you would not be protected by the state apparatus. It was not justifiable to assign all the responsibilities to the “consumers,” without holding the state institutions accountable to maintain the rule of law and ensure an ethical business environment. The ideologies of responsibilization and autonomous citizenship were paradoxically naturalized in a commentary published by one of the most progressive media outlets.

The key message that the author set out to deliver was captured here below:

… parents who send their children to Anh Vương school almost “totally contract” the care of the children to the school because they have to worry about making a living. (Nguyễn, 2014)

Like the previous article, the author of this commentary also turned to blame the parents for contracting their children to a bad service provider, and implicitly, they had to bear the consequences of their bad choice. The author did not look at the issue from the angle that the parents’ lack of information on Anh Vương autism center reflected a problem in the state education administration. It was not within the parents’ capacity to effectively evaluate if a child care center was meeting professional and ethical standards. Rather, it was the job of the licensing bodies to make sure credentials were in place for such a boarding center.

The moral judgment was put on the parents when the article turned to explicitly tell parents to seek ways to help their children, without relying on the education system or state authorities. It was a pragmatic coping strategy, given the poor system of governmental accountability, professional credentials and service quality in Vietnam. However, by accepting this status quo, the commentary contributed to lowering citizens’ expectations about the state’s accountability in ensuring an ethical market environment. Believing that their voices are powerless, the lay citizens in Vietnam do not push strongly for the party-state to maintain the rule of law for public interest and justice. Without a mechanism of credential-based and law-based governance, there will be more child abuse incidents like the one at Anh Vương autism center. Even though Thanhnien.vn put a disclaimer at the end of the article, that the writing style and perspective in the article was that of the contributor, Thanhnien.vn’s publication of the commentary belied its endeavor to question the authorities’ responsibilities and seek for a better policy for autism in their few other articles.

Only 6 out of 50 articles did draw on the child abuse incident to raise the question about policy, either deliberately in many paragraphs or obscurely in just a few sentences. The article that raised the issue at policy level most explicitly was published in an interview format on Daidoanket.vn on 23 July 2014. Đại đoàn kết has both print and electronic publications and is known for occationally raising big governance and policy issues to the extent it was forced to periodically cease publication before. The article was titled Trẻ tự kỷ bị hành hạ: Ai phải chịu trách nhiệm? [Autistic children were maltreated: who was responsible?] (Hoài Vũ & Bảo Hạnh, 2014). The title itself clearly showed the attempt to do the responsibility attribution work. The article featured an interview with Nguyễn Trọng An, Vice Head of the Division of Children Protection and Care, Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, who argued the incident was due to the governance loophole. He also pointed out that with the pressure from public opinions in serious incidents, higher ranking officials requested the lower authorities to investigate, but eventually no officers at ward, district or province and city levels were penalized for letting the problems happen. It was not common in the Vietnamese media discourse that such a direct comment on responsibility attribution was made by a state officer.

The reporter demonstrated the endeavor to seek for an understanding of the problem at the governance level in the following question: “Nowadays many autism schools open up but are not properly managed. In your opinion, what is the biggest loophole?” Mr An responded:

First and foremost, to open a childcare center or private school, [it is decided by] the local authorities, in particular within the authority of the Chairmen of the Ward and District. The Division of Education is only to provide professional consultation and inspection. After all, the authority is in the hands of local administration. If there is a problem, the local authorities must be responsible. (Nguyễn Trọng An, as quoted in Hoài Vũ & Bảo Hạnh, 2014)

In An’s perspective, those who were authorized to license such entities had to take charge. He used the metaphor “in the hand of” to emphasize the local authorities’ power in managing the education entities in their local territory. He also called out specifically two public service sectors to be responsible for a research to understand the needs of the community living with autism. The implication was that the state authorities were responsible to provide guidelines on education and health care for children with autism. In theory, when such guidelines were properly implemented and education rights were realized, an unethical autism center like Anh Vương would not exist. An added:

The important thing is this must be regulated in the law. That means, children must be entitled to their rights, their rights cannot be taken away. […] It must be written in the law that [they] are entitled to schooling. (Nguyễn Trọng An, as quoted in Hoài Vũ & Bảo Hạnh, 2014)

Mr An highlighted right-based principles and reiterated the right to education of children with disabilities, including children with autism. However, in the interview, as Vice Head of the Division of Children Protection and Care, An did not reflected on his own Division’s responsibility in children protection and care.

Overall, this article sent out a clear message that the state was responsible to offer public services and guidelines of such services. Law was mentioned three times and right was mentioned five times. Such imperative words as must, should, need and have to were mentioned 39 times in An’s interview. This article focused on the governance loophole and called for a policy solution most deliberately in this media discourse.

The above analysis reconfirmed the bias of the media in representing the child abuse incident as a personal human conflict or business misconduct, rather than building on it to call for a more well-rounded governance system and policy. The governance and policy loophole frame was touched upon in a few articles but they did not counterbalance the dominant frame of blaming the individual teachers, nannies, and the parents.

Discussion

This section explicitly employs the critical realism and social constructionism theories to explain the empirical findings. It builds on the structural mechanism of the cultural political economy to explain the media framing practice, ideological implications, and challenge the lack of social and policy agency from the media. The child abuse story broke on 21 July 2014, and after a short span of intensive public attention and virality within 10 days, both on mainstream and social media, the story died out quickly. A Google search conducted with the same keywords “Anh Vương,” [the school name] and “tự kỷ,” [autism] from 1 August 2014, found only two updates of the story on the news media. So, the media were mainly interested in the sensational story as well as the immediate reaction of the parents and the public.

Framing theorists urge researchers to pay attention more to the interpretive side of the matter to explicitly look into ideological concepts of “definition of the situation” and “naturalizing” (Reese, 2007, p. 149). After all, the framing in the media coverage of this incident was a blame game. The personal human conflict frame attributed the responsibility to families when the children were abused by the staff of an autism center. This is relatable to the concept of responsibilization in neoliberalized societies, where Brown (2016) suggests responsibilization defines human capacities and autonomy for adaptation or accountability as nominal signs of individual sovereignty. Furthermore, the Confucian influence on the culture and social reactions still reinforce child punishment as a normalized practice in Vietnam (Duong et al., 2019; Loan et al., 2018). Progress in child abuse prevention is still slow in the country due to the weak enforcement of the laws, lack of child protection systems, and ineffective school governance (Loan et al., 2018). In other words, the hybrid authoritarian and marketized political economy leave the citizens to deal with their own welfares, which is reinforced by the media’s ideology of responsibilization.

International media literature suggests that when issues are framed as personal or family stories, the contents become appealing to the audience because they touch the audience at an emotional level (Clarke, 2012; Iyengar, 1996; Nelson et al., 1997). But in authoritarian cultures like Vietnam and China, the episodic frame or personal stories are even more favored in media stories (Bie & Tang, 2015; Tang & Bie, 2016), not only because of the drama appeal, professional convenience, click metrics, but also because of the tendency to avoid politicalizing civic issues, which distinguishes authoritarian media with their counterparts elsewhere (Yến-Khanh et al., 2022). In this case, news frames do not only shape the meaning (Nelson et al., 1997) of the child abuse incident, which directs the dimension of the arguments and illuminates the core of the issue (Gamson & Modigliani, 1989, p. 143), but also forge a perception about who should be responsible (Iyengar, 1996).

Even though the media framed the child abuse incident as a professional misconduct and unethical business practice, no consequences for the local officers, abusive staff members, and Anh Vương autism center owner were reported by the media. When the media prioritized click metrics and commercial profitability over public affairs (A. Nguyen, 2013), in a country that justice, equity, and accountability values are low like Vietnam (UNDP, 2015; Vasavakul, 2014), the motive to attract viewership with sensational news values demonstrated to be stronger than the motive for justice and public interest.

Independent reports in a search for justice for a marginalized minority is actually pursued once in a while in Vietnam, partly by “profit and egalitarian motives” (Cain, 2014, p. 5) and partly by a “responsiveness to [media] readership” (Coe, 2015, p. 620). However, report by the Center for Media in Educating Community, sponsored by the British Embassy in Ha Noi (Phan Lợi et al., 2013) found that only 25% of the requests, criticism, and allegations that have been raised by the media are responded to in a timely manner by the relevant state organizations, and furthermore, most of the responses are generic and do not really address the issues. After decades of working without a strong belief in their role as a fourth estate (Abuza, 2015; Elmqvist & Luwarso, 2006), the media have internalized the conception about their own weak voice, impact, and accountability (Yến-Khanh, 2020).

The media outlets evidently made their stories salient in this case, but they only occasionally framed the child abuse incident as an imperative for governance and social policy. Thanhnien.vn and other media houses would have been obliged by journalism best practice to follow through and report how satisfactorily the case was redressed by the state authorities in the months afterwards. But that did not happen. Vietnamese media were similar to their Chinese colleagues in not holding the authorities accountable for building and realizing a support policy for people with autism (Bie & Tang, 2015; Tang & Bie, 2016). Even though state officials appeared randomly in the media discourse, their point of view enacts political power and dominates the texts (Entman, 1993, p. 55); and influences the perception of the child abuse matters at hand. From social constructionism perspective, the media have not exercised their agency power in setting the policy agenda for a critical social issue but compromised with the existing problematic social issues and structure.

The child abuse case analyzed in this study was just one of many incidents of abuses, exclusion, discrimination, and maltreatment reported by the media (Loan et al., 2018; Tran et al., 2017), but the status quo stays the same after the media peak coverage. Vietnamese netizens often call this media and public opinion phenomenon “chìm xuồng” [the sinking boat], which means a serious problem temporarily attracts intensive attention, but then is ignored by the state institutions, related stakeholders, media, and society. The problem is permitted to sink because the offenders might have bribed state officers and police to avoid legal consequences; or there are too many problems in the country, so the authorities simply ignore, the digital news media have to break other news in the game of click metrics and the public quickly forget an incident when others arise.

Without the persistent support and following up of the media, and without a belief on the impact of their own voice, families of the victims do not often bring these injustice incidents to the court to deal with them within the rule of law. This is because citizens in Vietnam do not trust the grievance resolution and court system (Nicholson, 2001). The cost for defendants in law suits might be higher than the potential consequences for the violators (Nicholson & Gillespie, 2005). According to the Justice index of Vietnam, confidence in state institutions is low: between 33% and 55% of the respondents to the UNDP (2015) survey say that they would not refer to state agencies for assistance in civic disputes, because they think state officials lack integrity (p. 25). As such, the majority of the population have accepted and internalized the notion that their voice is powerless. Vietnam is comparable in many ways to its role model China, where Harvey (2005) suggested, “neoliberalism in the economy was not to be accompanied by any progress in the fields of human, civil or democratic rights” (p. 123). Capitalist rationality is articulated selectively for Vietnam’s economic development, which in turn reinforce the Communist Party’s legitimacy, but the core precepts of socialist authoritarianism remain in the political and media system (Nicholson & Gillespie, 2005; Schwenkel & Leshkowich, 2012).

Voice and Accountability represent the way the authorities, citizens, media, and other social actors maintain participatory and dialogical mechanism to address matters of public concern. Vietnam was ranked very low in these tenets (World Bank, 2020) because Vietnamese citizens and media are not enabled to demand that rulers and other social entities respond and take action to address social issues of public interests. In Vietnam, such values as fairness, equality, social cohesion, universal service, and safety as the result of accountability cannot be publicly upheld when electorates have little influence on its elected political representatives and other administrative bodies and the courts (Vasavakul, 2014). Within this generative mechanism of injustice and low level of voice and accountability, the media only focused on the sensational side of the story to appeal to the click metrics and virality algorithm of the virtual world, without pursuing a thorough policy and governance resolution. In Vietnam’s hybridity of authoritarian logics, neoliberal ideologies, and weak agency of the media, individuals with disadvantages and their families were among the most marginalized.

Conclusion

Vietnamese online news media outlets framed the child abuse incident at an autism center dominantly as an unethical business practice and professional misconduct. They highlighted the reactions of the families and public in the human conflict frame for sensational purpose and virality. The blame was obviously placed on the abusers, but it was also slammed on the families of the victims. The frame highlighting the administration loophole in licensing and monitoring autism centers was minor. The state officers in most of the media coverage mentioned short-term, reactive business administration solutions rather than long-term and thorough policy direction. The ideologies of autonomous citizenship and responsibilization in the neoliberalized logics were disseminated, asking the citizens to be smart consumers, not to rely on the state authorities in protecting the citizens in a law-based market. The study demonstrated the media framing practice has the power to reflect and reinforce problematic responsibility attributions and ideologies in matters of conflict verses justice, service providers’ unethical practice versus consumers’ decision making, personal responsibility versus institutional accountability, and market rationality versus public interest.

The findings of this study suggested the governance and social policy frames need to be pursued by Vietnamese journalists. The child abuse problem can only be addressed when the news media hold state officers and service providers accountable in improving credentials at child care centers and educational service providers, so as to enable families living with autism to get access to qualified services. The implication is if the news media only focus on sensational news values to appeal to the virality algorithm, they might face “self-destruction” for the news media industry and create a “disaster” for public affairs and public interest journalism (A. Nguyen, 2013, pp. 147, 154).

This study contributes to theory by going beyond describing the frames but explaining why certain frames and ideologies were favored by Vietnamese news media. The combination of framing analysis with the cultural political economy analysis in a critical realism framework has demonstrated to empower the researcher to contextualize the media framing practice in Vietnam’s authoritarian political system, media commercialization, and the social setting that journalists operate within. This research bridges the gap between framing analysis and contextual national factors that have been identified in media studies elsewhere (Vu et al., 2019).

This case study provides a Vietnamese perspective on the state-media-citizen relations in an authoritarian country with a commercialized news media market and neoliberalized ideologies. Without a mechanism for accountability in a law-based governance, and a media system with strong voice and impact, citizens in Vietnam are subject to the neglect of the authoritarian state policy and the brutally neoliberalized fundamentalism of unregulated media and service markets. This study also contributes to the body of knowledge by pointing out the same phenomena in the news media should be explained differently in an authoritarian country, with its national structural factors. It also responds to the call for de-Westernizing media and communication studies with enriched political economy contexts, cultural insights, and local evidence.

Future studies could expand this topic by collecting more extensive data about child abuses and maltreatments from the Vietnamese news media to do quantitative framing analysis so as to enhance the generalization capacity of research. Examining social media data could also add more insight in understanding the phenomenon from the netizens’ perspectives and how the news media framing influence netizens and vice versa in cross media analysis.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Nguyễn Yến-Khanh

Author biography

Dr. Nguyễn Yến-Khanh is currently a faculty at RMIT University Vietnam. She holds a PhD in Communication from Massey University, New Zealand. Her research interests encompass health communication, social marketing, gender equity and inclusion for people with disabilities. Coming from Vietnam, she is keen to advance a research agenda that de-Westernizes media and communication studies.

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The blame game in a child abuse incident in Vietnamese online news media: A framing analysis

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Theoretical framework and methodology

The political economy of Vietnam and its news media

Data collection and framing analysis

What was the problem and who was responsible?

Discussion

Conclusion

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Author biography

References