Ideologies In American News Reports:Critical Discourse Analysis

From the perspective of critical linguistics, discourse is socially constitutive and is embedded with ideological meaning. The thesis intends to take American political news reporting on China or Chinese events as the research subject and resort to the major analytical tools of critical discourse analysis to reveal the implicit ideologies behind such news discourse. A total of25news reports are selected from the world-famous American newspaper—The New York Times-for qualitative and quantitative analysis. Another47pieces of news reports in China Daily are also selected randomly for simple contrastive analysis.Through careful study, it is found that American press often employs transitivity system (including six process types and transformation), lexical classification, and intertextuality (mainly direct speech and indirect speech) to achieve negative effects. On ideological level, the strong resistance and negative attitudes to China in most American news are due to distinctly different historical&societal and culture contexts.In addition, the author attempts to put forward some possible suggestions for China to combat such discourse hegemony based on post-modernism and mass communication theory. It is hoped that China can realize its discourse right internationally in real terms in the near future.