A Critical Analysis Of Ideological Tendencies In News Discourse From The Perspective Of Fairclough's Three-Dimensional Model

This thesis attempts to conduct a qualitative study of ideological tendencies in news texts from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis. The main task is to build an effective model based on Fairclough's Three-Dimensional Model and Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar and to analyze ideological differences in news texts by journalists from diverse backgrounds by treating each piece of news as a unity of text, discursive practice and social practice.Chapter One elucidates the nature and purpose of the present study, introduces the research design and methods, and outlines the framework of the thesis.Chapter Two reviews theories and methods of Critical Discourse Analysis and states similarities and differences between diverse approaches. It proceeds to elaborate on Fariclough's Three-Dimensional Model and Halliday's three metafunctions of language.Chapter Three conducts a contrastive research on the two pieces of news selected from Beijing Review and Time respectively reporting on the NATO's bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia on 8 May 1999. The study adopts Fairclough's Three-Dimensional Model as analytical framework. For text analysis, it borrows from Halliday's three metafunctions of language and examines linguistic features of the two texts from multiple angles as transitivity, modality, voice, Theme/Rheme and lexical classification. In discursive practice analysis, the notion of "intertextuality" is introduced to describe the phenomenon that texts are mutually constructed and intertextuality is the process of inheriting, reforming and upgrading historical texts. In social practice analysis, theories in the discipline of communication as news value standard, news policy standard and agenda setting process are applied to explain the differences between the two news texts on material choosing, emphasis laying, technique adopted and ideological tendencies.Chapter Four, the concluding chapter, points out that the examination of ideological tendencies in news discourses not only explains the social and cultural structure of news as discursive practice, but also is conducive to reminding readers of the hidden power in news in case they are controlled or misled unknowingly by seemingly objective and neutral language. It also pinpoint the possible significance of the study and its limitations.