A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On Chinese Smog In China Daily And The New York Times

Critical discourse analysis(henceforth CDA),as an interdisciplinary approach to discourse analysis,transcends the discourse analysis of the textual features and analyzes the context generated by specific discourse.Treating language as a category of social practice,in the view of critical linguists,linguistic representations are restricted by specific social-cultural,institutional and historical contexts.By means of linguistic analysis,the critical linguists aim to clarify the relationships among language,power and ideology so that the linguistic analysis can help readers resist and overcome the underlying various power relations and ideological manipulation in discourse.This study provides a critical comparative analysis of the China Smog-related news reports in the newspapers of China Daily and The New York Times.In this study,Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar are used to investigate the six related news samples from three dimensions.On the text level,the linguistic features of news samples are identified and analyzed by means of analytical methods such as transitivity and modality.On the discursive practice level,linguistic representations of news samples are tested in the light of intertextuality.On the social practice level,this paper explains the language differences between the two newspapers from the perspective of news values,social and institutional context and the ideology of the reporters.The purpose of this study is to denaturalize the various ideologies which are embedded in the discourse of China Daily and The New York Times,and also to explain the ideological differences in the institutional and social context.Through the analysis of six samples,it turns out that the discourses of the China’ smog in the two newspapers do not completely shake off the ideological intervention.In addition,they also embody different ideologies in the process of using language.The samples are surveyed at the textual level shows that,due to different ideological orientations,the reporters of the two newspapers differ in the choice of process and the selection of mode.In the practical level of discourse representation,it shows that two newspaperreporters invest ideologies which are usually congenial with their national interests through carefully choose news sources and news reports.At the social-practice level both explanation and discussion aim to explore the underlying reasons of the linguistic differences of the two newspapers: News is never about hard facts,it is always sorted and selected by journalists as propaganda tools to promote the ideas and positions of their countries.It has turned out that both newspapers ideologically have used the language to maintain and strengthen their respective government’s stance.China Daily,as the China’s throat,is dedicated to displaying a positive image of China to the world.The New York Times reflects the points of the U.S.government and makes every effort to seize every chance to show their prejudice against China.By means of these findings,it is expected that this study can make a modest contribution to the critical analysis of news discourse and raise people’s anti-control awareness in news reading.