A Case Study On Guidance Of News Discourse On Public Opinion

In the open and plural society nowadays, everyone can utter his voice in one way or the other. After being reported by mass media, many local incidents would arouse the public's great discussion, and then turn into public events. Proper guidance of public opinion promotes the solution of social event timely and effectively, while improper one will be bad for the solution, and worsens the situation of the social event. Nearly all the present research on public opinion guidance are undertaken in the fields of journalism and communication studies, and they mainly focus on what measures the government and news media should take to guide public opinion, and what principles newsmen and news media should obey in guiding public opinion. Their researches have seldom concerned the analysis of words, the text or discourse used by newsmen. So this thesis attempts to study the public events from the linguistic perspective, coupled with the theory of public opinion and communication to explore the public opinion guidance of news discourse.Taking Hangzhou Drag Racing Incident happened in 2009 as a case, this thesis divides the public opinion into three periods according to the rule of rising and falling of public opinion and communication, namely forming period, warming period and cooling period, and selects one specific news discourse for each period as data for analysis. Adopting the attitude system of Appraisal Theory as an analytical tool, this thesis aims to answer how news discourses guide the public opinion in a public event through analyzing the attitudinal resources of selected news discourses under affect, judgment and appreciation subsystem.This research has three findings. Firstly, as a kind of social practice, news discourse is not merely to tell the public the latest information. In composing news discourse, the newsman always uses many attitudinal resources consciously to attract the public's attention and then guide their opinion. Secondly, positive evaluative resources help build the positive image for the appraised, while negative ones always show one's negative attitude. But sometimes negative resources can be used to build positive image. Lastly, the attitudinal resources used in news discourses differ from each other due to different news types. For the hard news report, less attitudinal resources are used, and judgmental resources are even less. But for news comment, more evaluative resources are used, especially the resources used for judging one's behavior.The theoretical significance of this research is that this thesis has broken the subject boundaries of linguistics, journalism, communication and public opinion, which sheds a new light on related fields for further research. The findings of this research could also give some implications to the journalist or reporter on the proper way to use proper language and compose news discourse in guiding positive public opinion.