From Textbook Error to Moral Panic: Legitimation and Blame in Sri Lankan News Discourse on the Grade 6 English Module

In December 2025 a link to a website used for finding same-sex partners was found inside a Grade 6 English textbook produced by Sri Lanka’s National Institute of Education. What began as a printing error soon became a national political crisis, and the news coverage of it split along political lines. This study asks how two opposing news articles report the same event, and what their language choices show about power and ideology. It uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach, along with analysis of transitivity, presupposition, deixis, social actors, and mystification. Two publicly available articles were analysed. The first article uses conservative Buddhist nationalist language. Through passive sentences, an ‘us and them’ divide, and unargued assumptions, it frames the error as a moral conspiracy, sidelines the government, and gives no voice to LGBT people. The second article takes a left-progressive view. It defends the government’s response, compares the attacks on the Prime Minister to those faced by other women leaders, and builds a civic rather than culturally narrow idea of the nation, while avoiding naming the politicians behind the opposition campaign. Neither article simply reports the event; both take part in Sri Lanka’s wider political struggle after the 2024 election. The issue became politically powerful because negative attitudes to homosexuality are tied to religious and cultural identity. The study shows how everyday language choices carry competing ideologies in the news media.Keywords: Critical discourse analysis; media representation; ideology; Buddhist nationalism; Sri Lanka