A Critical Discourse Analysis On British And American News Reports Of Mexico Gulf Oil Spill

Mass media influence people unconsciously by accumulated discourse. Actually, the media discourse is embedded with ideology and power. News discourse, as an important media discourse, begins to draw attention of more and more researchers. This paper qualitatively and quantitatively analyzes the English coverage of Mexico Gulf oil spill in British and American news media from the perspective of critical discourse analysis based on corpus linguistics. It aims to discover the hidden ideology by analyzing the similarities and differences of the reports in the two media from the perspective of text, discourse and society.The research questions are as follows: (1) What are the high frequency words in British and American news reports on Mexico Gulf oil spill respectively? (2) What are the similarities and differences of key words in British and American news reports on Mexico Gulf oil spill? (3) What are the thematic features of British and American news reports respectively?The research procedure is listed below: (1) Collecting data and constructing corpora. Two mini-corpora are constructed by collecting the online news reports on Mexico Gulf oil spill retrieved from The Guardian and The New York Times, namely, the Guardian corpus (GC) and the New York Times corpus (NTC). The time span of news reports is from April 22, 2010 to October 31, 2010. (2) Analyzing the top 50 high frequency words. Extract the top 50 high frequency words in the two corpora respectively by software Wordsmith 5.0, and make a general comparison. (3) Analyzing the top 30 key words. Extract the top 30 key words in the two corpora respectively by using news part in BNCbaby as a conference corpus and conduct a contrastive analysis. (4) Identifying and analyzing the shared key words. Identify two shared key words by careful considerations to make deeper analysis. (5) Analyzing thematic features based on the titles of the news reports. Make a comparison of the news topics in two corpora by examining the titles. The findings are as follows: (1) 70% of the top 50 high frequency words are in common in the two corpora. These words shared by the two corpora point out the theme of this event and illustrate overall information of the oil spill to the readers. Among the top 30 key words, 21 are the same. Through the analysis, we find that some words are preferred by British media while others by American media. The different words reveal the different perspectives of the reporting details. GC tends to care more about the leaders of the company related to the incident and the saving work carried by BP, while NTC focuses on the response and measures of the American government. (2) Through the contrastive analysis on the two shared key words BP and Obama, a fact can be found that BP in GC has a mixed prosody, collocates relating to saving work carried by BP are of positive prosody, the media tries to save and help BP rebuild its good image. At the same time, there are more collocates relating to the interests of citizens in England. While collocates of BP in NTC show obvious negative prosody. Obama has negative prosody in both GC and NTC. Its collocations in GC show the bad situation and response measures of Obama. Collocations in NTC show extreme disappointment and great dissatisfaction towards the inept response of their government. Both the two media adopt words and expressions with implied ideologies, and they deem the interests of their own country as the starting point and present different positions by lexical expressions. (3) We also find the two media have different reporting foci through the contrastive analysis on the topics of the reports. British media cares more situations about BP, which is a company of its own country. While American media cares more about the livelihood of the victims in its own country. The two media make the reports beneficial to their own country by selecting different reporting materials according to their own interests, and by this way they successfully influenced the readers'judge.The implication of this research lies in that: (1) It is a successful attempt in the application of corpus linguistics to critical discourse analysis. (2) It is instructive in cultivating the critical reading awareness of the foreign language learners. (3) It is also helpful to cultivate the critical language awareness of both teachers and students in foreign language teaching and learning.