A Critical Discourse Analysis Of China-related Social Reporting In The New York Times And China Daily

News reporting serves as the most important medium for information exchange in modern era while its discourse is confined by various factors such as political and cultural environments, ideological inclinations of reporters'social class. It is thus by no means to be impartial, as most journalistic staff, if not all, claim to be. In effect, news does not only convey facts but opinions of the journalists who have different stances and ideologies. Under the cover of such"neutrality", news reports have affected increasingly the values people identify with and the way they understand the world.By analyzing the diction and wording employed in news with the aid of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study commits to bring out the embedded ideological tendencies, illustrating that there have never been objective or neutral reports. CDA is an analytical tool being used to dig out the imperceptible ideology hidden behind human speeches, with its divergent approaches prevailing in the public discourse interpretation. As a significant branch of modern linguistics, CDA is commonly recognized to have derived from the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), drawing on expertise from sociolinguistics, sociology, psychology and mass communication, and devoted to revealing the impact of ideology on discourse, the influence of discourse on ideology, as well as how they interact with each other and what's their social structures and power relations. It aims to raising audiences'critical awareness and capacity of appreciating various public discourses so as to deal properly with the growing influence exerted by language on social lives.Integrating CDA with social context and formal logic analyses, this thesis strives to conduct quantitative analyses and qualitative analyses on three aspects, including transitivity, propositions, and lexical classification, of two groups of China-related social news reports, on the first trial of the"Sanlu tainted milk case"respectively, from The New York Times (NYT) and China Daily (CD) in 2009. It verifies that the U.S. newspaper encodes the negative ideology against China's administrative and legal system in its report while its Chinese counterpart, though implicitly, appreciates the courts'rigorous conviction of the criminals involved in the process based on cited facts.The current study's background, objective, approach and significance are introduced briefly in the first chapter. The second starts with the definition of the word"ideology"and its classification, followed by a literature review on previous critical studies of ideology in public discourse, particularly in the news. The theoretical and philosophical foundations of CDA as well as its interrelationship with SFL in the development are also discussed. Chapter three explains the theoretical framework and the relevant analytic approaches adopted in the thesis. And both quantitative and qualitative methodologies shall be employed on the texts'transitivity and propositions while lexical classification is set to be interpreted through the qualitative approach. The fourth conducts quantitative and qualitative analyses of the selected data with the aid of the approaches mentioned above. Then social context interpretations are conducted in the fifth chapter to explore the political, economic, diplomatic, historical, cultural aspects in the U.S. and China that generate the different ideologies in their news reporting. The sixth chapter summarizes the study and concludes that with efficient linguistic devices media in the two countries express different ideological inclinations. It also gives proposals for the Chinese government to cope with the negative reports by the Western media and to reshape China's international image. Finally, the limitations of the current study and the suggestions for further research in this field are specified.The main contribution of the thesis consists in the combination of the CDA approach, based on SFL, with the social context interpretation in a bid to enable the news readers to capture and protect themselves from the ideological prejudice hidden behind the news narrative, especially from the Western media. In addition, a number of proposals are offered for the Chinese media in foreign languages in a bid to help reinforce their discursive power on the international stage. Finally, the former CDA studies preferred to elaborate on the political news where the distinct ideological tendencies are easier to identify whereas the current thesis is dedicated to testifying that even in the apparent more neutral social reporting, there remain power relations and ideological propensities influencing the news discourse in any given community at any time.