This paper investigates news media texts in the Malay- and English-language print media in Malaysia. We analyse ‘hard news’ reports covering the same story in Malay and English from the New Straits Times (NST) and Berita Harian (BH). Kaplan’s early studies on contrastive rhetoric (1966, 1987, 1988) suggest that cross-language differences in paragraph organisation may reflect differences in thinking or at least differences in writing conventions that are learnt in a culture. Thus, this study hopes to investigate to what extent this applies to Malay and English media texts. Using a modified CDA framework, a ‘product’ approach is applied in order to establish the degree of parallelism between the Malay and English media texts reporting the same story, and the degree of translation equivalence. A ‘process’ approach based on interviews is also used in order to discover the policies and processes involved in the construction of print media texts in both languages. The findings reveal that although there are commonalities in terms of structure and stance between the hard news texts found in both papers, there is some evidence of different stances adopted by the editors and journalists of the NST and the BH in terms of their inclusion of detail and their level of involvement or detachment in reporting crime and accident stories.