Critical Discourse Analysis Of The U.s. News Media Reported

The world at present is highly informationized and the international communication is increasing daily, while the news media is still an important way for people to access to the world. In the past few years, with the growing international power of China in politics, economy and culture, the American media has paid more attention to China stories. As the American media is one of the most powerful in the international communication, its international reports greatly influence other nations' images in the world. Therefore, a study of the internal and external features of language in reports about China will help us know more about how the media produces news and pictures China. Among all the linguistic studies, the critical discourse analysis (CDA) studies language structures and social contexts, and focuses on the relations between language, ideology and power. In the news discourse analysis, it acknowledges the relativity of the news discourse.This dissertation applies Halliday's functional model and Fairclough's model of CDA to make a quantitative analysis and a qualitative analysis. The author searches in the database EBSCO and gets the data of news reports about China in the New York Times and the Time magazine in 2007. Questions about the media attention, the contents and the overall attitudes in the reports are dealt with in the quantitative study. The qualitative study analyzes the transitivity system, classifications, the modality system and theme choices in 21 samples and discusses the social contexts of the texts. Hence, the relations between language, power and ideology are examined. Through the critical analysis, the author finds that the interest groups' ideologies hide in the news discourse in the aspect of politics, economy and culture. Ideologies produce media relativity and media bias. The Western news value system and the interest motivation carry out the vagueness of media.This dissertation consists of six parts. Chapter One briefly introduces the fundamental concepts of the news discourse and deals with the purpose and the significance of this study. Chapter Two reviews previous studies on news, particularly the critical studies on the news discourse, both at home and abroad. Chapter Three is about the theoretical methodology of this study. Halliday's functional model and Fairclough's CDA model are introduced. Chapter Four is the quantitative analysis of the media attention, the contents and the overall attitudes in news reports about China in the New York Times and Time in 2007. Chapter Five is the qualitative analysis and the case study of linguistic structures and discursive effects of 21 articles. Chapter Six concludes the findings, limitations of this study, and gives suggestions for the future researches.Through a critical study of reports about China in the American media, the author tries to find the joint point of SFG and CDA. The study of the relations between language structures and social contexts is to answer questions: how the American reporters use language strategies to picture China's image and to construct China's social structures; how ideologies and power sink into the news discourse and make the public discourse to influence and to control the audience. This study emphasizes the significance of critical reading in the process of language learning and the world cognition.