A Comparative Study Of Political News Reporting In American Newspapers

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a branch of linguistics is also called critical linguistics. It emerged in the late 1970s, and was matured both theoretically and methodologically up to 1980s. It originated from Frankfurt school's critical theory, and is based mainly on Halliday's systemic-functional linguistics. Critical linguists think that language is not a transparent medium for communication, nor is it a mere reflex of a society. It intervenes in social processes, and contributes to the production of these processes. Therefore, we must adopt a critical approach to the analysis of public discourses, especially news discourses.One of the main purposes of critical linguistics is to protrude the implicit ideological meaning through language analysis, so people can reexamine it. And this thesis has the same purpose with critical linguistics. The thesis makes a comparative study among three American newspapers with analytical tools of critical discourse analysis, in the hope of finding out the hidden ideological meaning. And it aims to reveal how ideology influences discourses, how discourses react to ideologies, and how they serve the society.This thesis will first introduce the history of the development of CDA from home and abroad, and then make an elaboration of the analytic tools from the perspective of their definitions, frameworks and contents. At last specific analysis of several original political news discourses about the same event from well-known American newspapers is conducted, and the hypothesis is proved. The subtle differences of stances and attitudes of the three newspapers in reporting the same event are discovered.