The Discursive Analysis Of News Values From The Cross-cultural Perspective

The Discursive News Value Analysis(DNVA)is a relatively new interdisciplinary research method,which focuses on how journalists construct news value through linguistic resources.In recent years,novel coronavirus pneumonia has attracted worldwide attention and become a hot topic in the global news media.China Daily and New York Times are respectively one of the authoritative mainstream media in China and the United States.Based on DNVA framework,this study tends to analyze the discourse construction of epidemic news in China Daily and New York Times from a cross-cultural perspective.The quantitative and qualitative research methods is adopted in the study.First of all,the theme relevance was taken as the standard,and 30 news reports from February to June 2020 in China Daily and 30 news reports from June to October 2020 in New York Times was selected respectively from the outbreak of the pandemic as two self-built corpus.With the DNVA framework,UAM Corpus Tool 3.0 was used to annotate all the news values.According to the statistical annotated news values,the proportion data of each news value and their linguistic devices was obtained by the word frequency analysis and feature coding in the software.Among the nine news values,the three most prominent news values constructed in China Daily and New York Times were analyzed.Finally,according to Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory,the cultural differences reflected in the news values construction were explored.The results indicate that all news values have been constructed in the epidemic news reports in China Daily and New York Times.As the data shows,Positivity,Eliteness,and Superlativeness are the most prominent news values in China Daily,while Negativity,Personalization,and Superlativeness are the most prominent news values in New York Times.The analysis of the news values constructions in China Daily and New York Times also reflected some cultural differences.Firstly,the “unity and harmony” and “elite” were emphasized in China Daily to construct Eliteness,in most cases,reflecting the collectivism and high power distance culture,while many ordinary people’s views and attitudes were presented in New York Times to construct Personalization,generally reflecting the individualism and low power distance culture.Secondly,Positivity was mostly constructed in China Daily,practically showing the confidence in the national future sustainable development and,to some extent,reflecting the long-term orientation,while Negativity was mostly constructed in New York Times,showing more current crisis and,basically reflecting the short-term orientation.Thirdly,the construction of Superlativeness was highlighted in both China Daily and New York Times.However,linguistic device“qualifiers”were used in different news types,certainly reflecting the cultural differences in uncertainty avoidance.In addition to the above prominent news values,some cultural differences are also reflected in the construction of other news values.The discursive study of the news values construction from a cross-cultural perspective is a relatively new practice in related research fields,which can help readers better understand the cultural differences behind Chinese and American media reports and the impact of culture on their reporting orientation.