A Critical Discourse Analysis Of The News Reports On CNN Concerning 7·5 Event In Xinjiang

In July 5th, 2009, at about 8 p.m., a series of serious riots and fire occurred in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China. Media both at home and abroad have published a series of reports on this event which is labeled Xinjiang 7·5 Event. Taking Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) as the theoretical framework, this study has analyzed the linguistic features and implied ideology of the news reports on CNN website concerning Xinjiang 7·5 Event.The study collected from CNN website 37 news reports from July 6th, 2009 to December 31st, 2010 concerning Xinjiang 7·5 Event. It intends to answer the following research questions: What are the linguistic features and structures in the news reports on CNN concerning Xinjiang 7·5 Event? What is the ideology expressed through the linguistic features and structures in the news reports? Do the linguistic features and structures and the implied ideology in these news reports distort the truth and still conceal the longtime"prejudice"against China?Through the analysis of the features of the lexical choice, transitivity, modality, news source and mode of the speech, it is found that in lexical choice, the news reports on CNN website are liable to describe the attitudes and reactions of the Chinese government; in transitivity, material process, relational process and verbal process are widely used; in modality, the words of low value of modality are mainly employed; in news source, the ratio of unspecified source is up to 81.4%; in the news samples, 61.5% are indirect speech.Integrating the above results, the study goes further to probe into whether the prejudice exists in the news samples. It is found that these news reports tend to use a large scale of negative vocabulary to describe the Chinese government's attitudes and response to the event. In the news source, these reports are inclining to listen to the voices of Rebyia and her supporters, and the critical voices from abroad, which result in some negative impact on Chinese government's image in the world. So it can be seen that prejudice still exists in the news reports on CNN concerning Xinjiang 7·5 Event to some degree. The prejudice may be of influence on people's impression of China and their attitudes towards China, and even be of influence on diplomatic polices between countries.It is hoped that the present study will be of help for the readers to improve their sensitivity of the prejudice and connotative ideology in the news reports by foreign media. It will be also of help to give the Chinese media workers the implication that they should pay more attention to the methods and tactics in the news reports concerning Xinjiang to the outside world, and at the same time protecting the image of Chinese government. The study also provides evidence that Critical Discourse Analysis is a powerful tool that can be adopted in the research of the language and ideology, and Fairclough's three-dimensional model can be extensively applied.