| As a special type of writing genre, news has the feature of speaking with facts. In today’s world when the information highway is developing fast, news serves as an important means of spreading information and influencing the public. News plays a very important role in informing and influencing the readers in regards of the news reports on events which have international influence. In recent years, several food safety scandals have taken place in China. As one of the scandals, the Sanlu melamine-tainted formula case in2008set off a panic among the public and attracted the government’s attention. The media in and outside our country reported much on this issue. As for the Chinese food safety issue, how the American main-stream media focused on it and how the news reports exposed the ideology are worth focus and research.In studying the news discourse, Critical Discourse Analysis is often adopted. Critical Discourse Analysis analyzes the linguistic features of the discourse and the social and historical background on which the discourse emerges in order to examine the ideology hidden behind the language, and furthermore to reveal the complicated relationship between language and ideology. Through Critical Discourse Analysis, readers can be exposed to the thinking modes people are used to and inclined to ignore.Adopting the means of Critical Discourse Analysis, this study uses Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework and the analytical tools of Systematic Functional Grammar to analyze the texts of the news reports chosen and then comes to its conclusion. It does research on the news reports on Chinese food safety issue published on two American mainstream media, namely the news from http://www.newyorktimes.com and http://www.time.com. The criterion for selecting news is that the news reports are related to the specific food safety affair, the melamine-tainted formula, from the very beginning of the event, September in2008to the latest focus, April in2011. The whole analyzing process is divided into three parts, namely, description, interpretation and explanation. In the first part, the study uses the analytical tools of transitivity, transformation and word classification on the lingual level. In the second part, it analyzes the news in terms of the sources of news and the forms of citation. In the last part, it uncovers the ideology embedded in the reports from the angles of historical and economical background and political point of view on the societal level.The major findings are as follows:(1) The material process takes the largest percentage of the whole six processes and verbal process takes the third largest percentage instead of mental process; Nominalization and Passivization phenomena occur in the discourse; some ideology-carrying words are chosen in depicting the happenings.(2) The proportion of the case with indefinite new source is much larger than that of the case with definite new source; the quantity of the case with indirect citing is much larger than that of the case with direct citing.(3) On the one hand, America tends to consider itself as the most powerful in the world and make judgments on the other countries’issues. On the other hand, America considers China not only as an important international trade partner of America but also a big threat to America’s position in the world. So the American media keep on show their concern over Chinese issues, especially dirty issues and occasionally show contempt on Chinese government and society.This study tries to analyze the news reports from several levels so as to explain the ideological meaning behind the news reports and then to help the readers to penetrate into the language phenomena to see the essence of the news reports. What’s more, it will enhance the readers’critical awareness in reading news. |
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