Brainwashing or nurturing positive values: Competing voices in Hong Kong's national education debate

•Hong Kong news expresses negative public attitudes and actions.•Hong Kong news expresses defensive government actions.•Hong Kong news expresses schools, students and parents’ assertive behaviours.•Journalists use FIGHT metaphors for protester actions and government responses.•Government press releases are literal with a neutral/positive semantic prosody.

This corpus-based discourse analytical study compares the use of collocations, semantic preferences, semantic prosodies and metaphors in the news reports and Hong Kong Government press releases concerning the introduction of the school subject Moral and National Education in Hong Kong in 2012. The analysis of word co-occurrences with the phrase ‘national education’ in the two corpora shows that journalists use various FIGHT metaphors to describe the attitudes and actions of protesters and the responses of the government. However, the government press releases are much more literal, showing a neutral to positive tone and implying that when the planned introduction was shelved, national education will be re-introduced in the future.