National narratives and collective historical consciousness have long shaped how ethnic identities and knowledge are legitimized in Malaysia. Yet the rise of digital media between 2010 and 2015, a period marked by political realignment, heightened ethno-religious contestation, and state reassertion through legal controls, which created a pivotal discursive window in which competing historical truths were publicly negotiated. This study investigates how ideologies such as Ketuanan Melayu (Malay supremacy) were discursively embedded in online news narratives during this formative era. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s theory of representation (focusing on signification and encoding), Michel Foucault’s power/knowledge framework (emphasising regimes of truth and discursive formation), and Edward Said’s concept of internal Orientalism (highlighting the racialised positioning of ethnic ‘Others’), the research employs Carla Willig’s six-step Foucauldian Discourse Analysis within a social constructionist paradigm. From an initial corpus of 288 articles published between 2010 and 2015 by The Star Online (English-medium, secular-liberal) and Utusan Malaysia Online (Malay-medium, Malay-Muslim nationalist), a purposive subsample of 59 texts substantively engaging with historical narratives was selected for in-depth analysis. Findings reveal that digital news platforms not only reproduced hegemonic ethno-nationalist discourses, particularly through the conflation of Malay identity with Islam and constitutional privilege, but also exposes tensions in Malaysia’s national narrative, where hegemonic and counter-hegemonic historical accounts contest legitimacy, where alternative readings of history briefly gained traction before being constrained by the 2015 Sedition Act amendments. While the study’s scope is intentionally focused on mainstream media discourses (acknowledging limited Chinese and Indian community representation), it illuminates how online journalism functioned as both an archival mechanism and a battleground for historical legitimacy. By situating digital narratives within specific historical and institutional conditions, this article contributes to critical debates in postcolonial media theory and discursive historiography demonstrating that the politics of representation in Malaysia’s cyberspace is never neutral, but constitutive of identity, power, and national belonging.
Zamri et al. (Thu,) studied this question.