A Critical Discourse Analysis Of New York Times And Wall Street Journal Reports On Chinese, Japanese Boats Collision

Owing to the widespread influence of mass media, news, as a main means of diffusing information, becomes the subject of a great deal of intellectual scrutiny. Under this trend, Critical Discourse Analysis came into being, aiming at disclosing the relationships between language, power and ideology through the studies on public discourses; meanwhile exposing the counteraction of public discourses on the formation of people's ideology. News reports are inevitably influenced by domain ideologies, so they can affect and control people's cognition directly or indirectly and remain a significant factor in the formation of people's ideologies and attitudes.New York Times and Wall Street Journal, in the seemingly objective news narrative do different ideological inclination. The thesis exposes the negative ideologies and its origin.Integrating CDA with sociological analytical techniques, the present study puts emphasis on the concrete analysis of political news reports based on Fairclough's three-dimensional model. During the analysis of the samples, the author mainly employed the analytical tools of Halliday's systemic-functional grammar such as transitivity, lexical classification, modality, speech reporting and so on, of China-related news coverage, concerned with the first trial on the"Japanese and Chinese Boats Collide"case, from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal respectively in 2010. It is dedicated to demonstrating that the U.S. newspaper encodes the negative ideology. Then sociological tools are applied in the thesis to explore the conventional biases toward China rooted in the American political, economic, historical, cultural and social contexts that generate the negative ideology against China in a string of news reporting.The theoretical implication of the study is to provide a means of revealing ideologies behind languages through analyzing superficial structure of language and the practical implication is to make a proposal of raising students'critical reading awareness in English language teaching, especially in the teaching of journalistic English with a view to improving their reading and writing abilities. The main purpose of the thesis consists in the combination of the CDA approach, based on SFL, with the sociological interpretation in a bid to enable the news readers to capture and protect themselves from the ideological prejudice hidden behind the news narrative, especially from the Western media.The whole thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is the current study's background, objective and significance. Chapter Two is a literature review on previous critical studies of ideology in public discourse, particularly in the news texts. Chapter Three is research methodology and analytical tools. Chapter Four devotes to data collection and analysis of materials chosen. The whole thesis is concluded with a summary of the main points. Limitations and the direction of further study are also pointed out.