The Text Analysis Of Sphere Of Consensus In Journalism

After the study of U.S. media reports about the Vietnam War, U.S. Journalism scholar Hallin points out that Journalism can be divided into three fields, that is, sphere of consensus, sphere of legitimate controversy and sphere of deviance. Then these three fields have been discussed in the academics. This paper focuses on the sphere of consensus. With the appraisal systems and power/solidarity semantic theory as the theoretical support, this paper carries out a case study for those news reports of3·28Wang-jia-ling mine accident in "People’s Daily","Southern Weekend" and "Xinmin Evening News", and discusses the internal hierarchy of the sphere of consensus. This paper is divided into four chapters:the division of Journalism, theoretical foundations and items for analyzing, the text analysis, the conclusion.The first chapter is about the division of Journalism. This chapter first introduces Hallin’s division of Journalism, and describes the sphere of consensus in details, then points out the achievements and shortcomings in the current research. On this basis, the purpose, ideas and structure of this research are raised. Specifically speaking, with the analysis of the reports of Wang-jia-ling as a case,this paper studies the sphere of the sphere of consensus from the linguistic perspective and try to understand the hierarchy of sphere of consensus and the way of construction.The second chapter is about the theoretical foundations and items for the analysis. This chapter introduces the attitude system of the appraisal systems and the power/solidarity semantic theory. The attitude system is the main field of analytical evaluation of resources and the construction of social groups. The power/solidarity semantic theory can further reveal the author’s attitude and emotional. According to the purpose of this research, the personal pronouns and appellations analysis of the item are selected. Through the text analysis, the internal hierarchy of the sphere of consensus in three media is expected to be revealed.The third chapter is the text analysis. The analysis of the personal pronouns and appellations indicates that when the three media used the first person pronoun we or appellations to refer to social groups, they actually contain different power/solidarity semantics. So the media chose different V or T form. A further analysis of the attitude system reveals that the three media had different processing to personal pronouns and appellations used as evaluation resources. The analysis shows that the three media are at different levels of the sphere of consensus when they report the mining accidents.The forth chapter is the conclusion. Although the reports of the mining accident on the three media belong to the sphere of consensus, they differ on the desirable degree. That is, People’s Daily is in the relative core position of the sphere, Xinmin Evening News is in relative the middle of the sphere of the consensus, Southern Weekend is in the relative edge of the sphere.