Framing criminality in Philippine digital news: A corpus-assisted gendered analysis of crime reporting

Abstract

Crime reporting plays a significant role in shaping public perceptions of criminality, justice, and gendered social identities. This study examines how Philippine digital news constructs male and female criminality through lexical choices, syntactic structures, and narrative framing. Using a corpus-assisted descriptive design, the study analyzed six crime reports published by INQUIRER.NET between 2010 and 2024, comprising three reports on male offenders and three on female offenders. The corpus consisted of 4,180 words and was examined using Voyant Tools for lexical frequency and collocation patterns, AntConc for syntactic and phraseological structures, and ChatGPT-assisted qualitative coding for thematic synthesis and framing analysis. Findings reveal systematic gendered differences in crime reporting. Reports on male offenders foreground institutional processes, legal actions, and procedural outcomes, often emphasizing agency through references to courts, financial schemes, and judicial decisions. In contrast, reports on female offenders show stronger personalization, greater emphasis on named individuals, and more frequent associations with moral evaluation, emotional connotations, and reputational framing. These patterns suggest that male criminality is more frequently framed through institutional accountability, whereas female criminality is more often interpreted through moralized and gendered discourse. The study contributes to applied linguistics and media discourse studies by demonstrating how narrative framing and gendered language shape representations of crime in Philippine digital journalism, with implications for media ethics, public perception, and discourse-based gender studies.