Hard News: Representation Of Ideology

News, as a means of communication, is social and is of tendency. It is not like what traditional linguistics claimed is a transparent medium for communication about an objective world. The characteristics of being social and presenting ideological tendencies are well recognized and taken seriously by modern linguists."Critical Linguistics", which was developed mainly by Roger Fouler and Gunther Kress from the late 1970s, is based on Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar (SFG). It aims to study the relationships between language, ideology and power. Initiated by Critical Linguistics,"Critical Discourse Analysis"(CDA), offers critical readings of news reports, political propagandas, regulations and others, showing how social groups (us vs them) are presented in discourse and how ideological discourse is constructed socio-politically as a means to confirm group dominance and social power.Hard news is a representation of the ideology. Drawing on the theories of Critical Linguistics and Van Dijk's macrostructure of news, the present investigation attempts to conduct a qualitative study of ideological tendencies in the English hard news reports both in Chinese news magazines and in American news magazines. The study seeks to reveal the different ideological points of view from the perspective of comparative analysis in two aspects: macro-strategic analysis and micro-strategic analysis. The findings show that hard news reports represent socialized ideologies, which take the controlling effect in the disguise of language. Hard news reports are official discourses and are embodiments of dominant ideologies, so they inevitably affect and control people's cognition either directly or indirectly and influence people's ideologies and attitudes.The thesis first reviews previous studies on hard news reports, and then provides an introduction of the current analytic tool __ Critical Discourse Analysis. Based on the theory of CDA, the thesis conducts a specific comparative analysis of a pair of English hard news...