PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

Media discourse plays a vital role in shaping public perceptions, constructing ideologies, and influencing societal narratives. However, the study of media discourse in the Malaysian context has been relatively limited, particularly through a corpus-based lens. This review systematically identifies the research trends in Malaysian media discourse using a corpus-based approach. The included papers were extracted from two databases, namely Scopus and Web of Science (WoS), with 23 articles selected from 122 papers published between 2019 and 2024 based on specific exclusion and inclusion criteria. First, the significant findings show that there was underutilisation of advanced corpus tools and general corpora. Second, there was limited theoretical engagement within CDA frameworks. Third, the thematic analysis revealed a lack of focus on socioeconomic themes despite their societal relevance in Malaysia. These findings highlight ongoing gaps in Malaysian media discourse and corpus-based studies. Generally, this review provides insights for linguists and researchers to understand the diverse portrayal of Malaysian media from multiple perspectives while identifying key gaps and directions for future research. To address these gaps, future studies are recommended to explore underrepresented socioeconomic issues and incorporate more diverse corpus designs and advanced analytical tools in Malaysian media discourse.