| News is a practice, a product of the social and political world on which it reports. Although media may not have the power to dominate what people think, it can indeed influence what people think out and how they prioritize information. News media language is always a major part in establishing the systems of ideas or theories which human beings impose on the world. Political news is playing an increasingly important role today. Ideology is frequently mystified and concealed behind the literal expressions in political news report.Nowadays, Critical Discourse Analysis is being used in various ways in relevant literature. CDA, as a branch of linguistics, originated from Frankfurt school's critical theory. It is fully manifested in Halliday's systemic-functional linguistics as fundamental foundations and sources of methodology. With the assistance of linguistics, sociology, psychology and communication theories, it aims to expose the influence of ideology upon discourses, the retroaction of discourses upon ideology, and how ideology and discourses originate from social structure and power relationship and how they serve different power groups. The main purpose of CDA is to enhance people's language awareness and their capability in appreciating and criticizing various discourses so that they can better handle the increasingly wide intervention of language in social life.The research is an attempt to make a critical analysis of political news discourse. Its ultimate goal is to tentatively sketch and analyze a functional model of CDA, which endeavors to reveal power relations and ideology hidden in the genre of political new, and to provide a means of"seeing through language": to probe into the language used in political news reports and to explain how language is used to reinforce powerful groups'political ideologies.This paper consists of five parts. Chapter One offers an introduction to the background, objective and methodology of the study, and also reviews the related literature. Chapter Two is a theoretical foundation for the study which will first review the development of CDA, and then explores power, ideology and transitivity as an analytical tool of CDA, and then sets up a functional framework of CDA to analyze news discourse. Chapter Three describes the analytic framework and the method of the study. The general introduction of news and news discourse and the implication of news media with CDA are given at first. Then the framework and methodology of the following analysis are discussed briefly, from the dimension of transitivity, lexical choice, modality, proposition analysis and intertextuality. Chapter Four is the core part of the thesis. Based on the theoretical foundation and analytic method introduced in Chapter Two and Three, tentative study of political news reports is conducted. By comparing the differences in the four employed tools, this paper tends to discover the different attitudes and underlying ideology in different medias. Chapter Five summarizes the findings and conclusions of the study with mentioning of its weakness.
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