A Critical Analysis Of News Reports On Pompeo’s Announcement About "The Clean Network"

With the advent of new forms of media communication,Internet gathers current societal greatest communication resources,particularly the mainstream media,which have considerable discourse power to converse for public opinion direction and the voice of public events.Conflicts and frictions over the dominance of the worldwide Internet have been prevalent as the grade of Internet communication technology in each country has developed.By applying the method from Sinclair’s theory,using the software BFSU Power Conc 1.0,this thesis focuses on online reports relevant to the U.S.government’s announcement of the Clean Network Program in the mainstream media and is expected to examine the collocations and colligations associated with the keyword in these news discourses.A specific analytical framework that combines critical discourse analysis methods with corpus linguistic tools is designed in this thesis where the quantitative analysis is complemented by a qualitative analysis.The framework is supportive of the theoretical foundation and feasible for practical operation.And by summarizing the semantic prosody,the author also employs Fairclough’s dialectical-relational approach in critical discourse analysis to interpret the relationship between these discourse features and ideology and power,and then delves into how the media uses these news discourses to shape public opinion and the image of Chinese Internet companies.It shows that the online news discourse on the Clean Network Program has a more unpalatable tone.The U.S.media legitimized the U.S.-first political aspirations by using a deliberately chosen form of discourse that accused Chinese Internet companies and 5G technology of posing a huge danger and threat to security and violating personal privacy in order to instill fear in its readers.Besides critically evaluating the discourse of American news reports,this study not only provides new perspectives for investigating the establishment and expansion of American Internet hegemony,as well as international relations and communication,but also investigates the various political and economic factors behind the news discourse and improve understanding of the relationship between ideology and news discourse.