A Critical Discourse Study Of News Reports On COVID-19 In The New York Times And China Daily

Pandemics are always hot issues across the world since epidemics could pose new challenges to the globe.Some unexplained pneumonia cases were reported in Wuhan,China in December 2019,and spread throughout the world soon at a high speed.In this context,this issue has attracted the interest of the media across the globe.Since March 2020,the number of confirmed cases and deaths in the United States has been increasing dramatically.In this context,this issue has attracted the interest of the media across the globe.Up to now,there is no related studies to compare how the mainstream newspapers of these two biggest economies in the world represented the COVID-19 epidemic from the perspective of critical discourse studies,this study aims to analyse their similarities and differences in this regard and explore the relationship between language use and news stance.The author collected 1449 relevant articles from The New York Times and 2136 article from China Daily as the corpora for this study.Using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis,this study employed qualitative and quantitative methods and analysed these news reports to investigate how The New York Times and China Daily respectively represented this issue and what news stance was respectively expressed by them.The compassion of keywords,collocates and concordances of the two corpora shows some similarities and differences in the media coverage of COVID-19 in The New York Times and China Daily.Firstly,both newspapers defined the outbreak of infectious epidemic as the main problems,but The New York Times considered the COVID-19 epidemic as the economic,social and political crisis.As for the causes of the disease,both of the newspapers regarded the novel coronavirus as causing the contagion of the disease.On the other hand,The New York Times framed those patients as one of the causes of the epidemic while China Daily constructed imported cases as the main reason for the spread of the disease.As for the consequences of this issue both newspapers agreed that the epidemic impacted the whole world,especially in terms of jobs,schooling and people’s daily life.In addition,China Daily highlighted what the Chinese government did for the people.With regard to how to solve this problem,both newspapers showed that their governments and people took effective ways to prevent the contagion of the disease.This study is an attempt that combines corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis and media framing to compare the different representations of COVID-19 epidemic in two newspapers,which is hoped to promote the development of the two interdisciplinary subjects: linguistics and communication.