| Mass media is an important tool which is indispensable for transmitting information in modern society and is exerting more and more important influence on the lives of people in the society. As an important means of communication and a particular type of media discourse, news report serves as the source of information, of entertainment and leisure activity and a shaper of perception, behavior and institutions. The influence thus arises from' the report enables media discourse to receive particular scrutiny in the study of critical discourse analysis (CDA). CDA practitioners have shown deep interest in and begin devoting to the study of the hidden or implicit ideology embedded in language in general and news discourse in particular. In fact, the main motivating principle of CDA is to explore ideology in language. It has been proven by CDA practitioners over the past twenty years of study that CDA is capable of offering the theoretical foundation and methods for a better understanding of media discourses as being ideologically driven.This study first provides an introduction of the theoretical and analytical approaches available in the field of critical discourse analysis. Then, based on Halliday's Systemic-functional Grammar and models of CDA practitioners, the present study develops a framework for understanding and analyzing the discourse of the media which aims to analyze news texts from two levels: the textual level and the intertextual level. To exemplify how the framework works and the effectiveness of the framework, the present study applies the framework to an analysis of a total amount of five Chinese and English news texts from the People's Daily and the Washington Post on the representation and portrayal of Iraq during the period of the weapon inspection in 2003. In the course of the study, the ideological meaning of the language in the news reports is revealed and all kinds of 'common-sense' meanings in the examples of the language in news reports are denaturalized. The findings of the study reveal that there are great differences between the representations of Iraq in the two newspapers. As is illustrated, the differences are embedded in various discursive practices, structures of clause grammar and structures above the clause level, such as that in the lexical choices, transitivity system, and intertextuality employed to represent Iraq. And the way by which Iraq is represented as a different image in each newspaper illustrates the fact that language can be employed by and is situated in different social and cultural groups to represent the same event from their own particular angle. The selection of particular angle of representation immediately gives a partial view of the world, thus manifests a difference in ideology. The results thus demonstrate that the framework proposed is applicable in the contrastive analysis of media discourse.This thesis conducts a preliminary study on the analysis of Chinese news texts in CDA approach, and proposes the author's own speculation on and idea of the development of CDA. The practical significance lies in the fact that it tries to provide readers with a different perspective of analyzing language, a critical reading method, so that they can develop a critical language awareness in language and are able to realize the ideological point of view embedded in language.
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