An Investigation Into The Ideology In American News Media

The Critical Discourse Analysis views the discourse as a social practice which on the one hand, is determined by the social structure and on the other hand sustains or even changes the social structure. The key element of CDA is the critical awareness of the analyst.The departure of Google's search engine in mainland China—Google.cn finally puts an end to the conflict between China and Google which revolves around the censorship. This thesis selects eight news reports concerning the censorship issue between China and Google from three major news websites in the USA:cnn.com of CNN, nytimes.com of New York Times and usatoday.com of USA Today.This thesis, adopting Fairclough's three dimensional theory and Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar, does an analysis of the selected data in a critical way with an aim to identify the hidden ideology in these reports. The thesis is structured in accordance with the three steps proposed by Fairclough (1989):description, interpretation and explanation. Halliday's functional grammar serves as the analytical tool in analyzing three individual news samples. The detailed analysis of three news samples is aimed at examining the linguistic features of these news reports, i.e. the description of texts. In the stage of interpretation, themes in these reports are identified to show what's going on, who are involved, what kind of relationship they have and what the role of language is. In the stage of explanation, the social context is presented for a better understanding of the dialectical relationship between language and social structures.The practical implication of the study lies in arousing a critical awareness among English learners in China. Reading online English news produced by websites like nytimes.com is viewed as an effective method to complement their English study. Without a critical awareness, they have the tendency to be ideologically influenced by what they read.