A Critical Analysis Of The Ideological Bias In American Media

Language is the primary domain of ideology. Western socialists first shed attention on therelation between language and ideology in the 1960s, which then became the main focus of anew branch of linguistics-critical linguistics. Studies by critical linguists since 1970ssuggest that race discrimination, gender discrimination and political conflicts widely existamong media language.Also from a critical linguistics perspective, this thesis compares the two news texts related tothe same event-the start of the first trial of Saddam Hussein-reported by CNN and FOX. Byanalysis of the two news texts, the study tends to discover the different attitudes and theunderlying ideology in the two media.The first chapter is a brief introduction of the background, aim, method of the study. Thesecond chapter begins with explanation of "ideology", followed by a literature review on theprevious studies of ideology in language, especially media language. The relation betweenCL and other linguistics is also discussed. Chapter 3 explains the selection of database andanalytic method. The fourth chapter is a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the selecteddata. The last chapter summarizes the thesis and makes the conclusion that with linguisticdevices the two media express different ideological biases, i.e., FOX is stronglypro-republican and pro-Bush administration, whereas CNN holds negative attitudes towardsthe Bush government and the fairness of the trial, expressing a pro-democratic bias.