Meanings In Images And Ideologies Of Media: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of News Photos On The March 14^th Violence In Tibet

As science and technology develops quickly, discourse is becoming more and more multimodal. News reports are in the vanguard of this phenomenon: more and more photos appear in newspapers and even videos are attached to the news reports online. That is to say, news photos play more and more important roles in the news reports. Critical discourse analysts pay much attention to the analysis of news, but they only focus on the words. Few studies are about the analysis of photos in the news reports.Applying Kress and van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar to a multimodal discourse analysis of news photos about the riot on March 14th in Tibet, this thesis attempts to reveal the ideologies hidden in the Chinese and American media. Specifically speaking, through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data, this paper gradually achieves the following conclusions: in the Chinese media, the police are construed as the protectors of the Tibetans and our society; the insurgents are the'thugs'who bring in the disaster to the Tibetans and cause much damage to Tibet. On the contrary, in the American media, the police are constructed as the'suppressers': they are suppressing the insurgents and even the common people; the insurgents are represented as someone weak. In some photos, the insurgents are even manifested as someone who is doing the right thing and who stands for justice.It is found that the media agents, by way of vector, contact, distance, perspective, information value, salience, and framing, has extended the images from their representative meaning, interactional meaning and compositional meaning to a way of expressing their ideologies.