A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Disaster New Discourses

News discourse, as a major pattern of mass media, is once believed to record the hard facts and hence, should be value-free. This point of view has been greatly challenged by scholars from the fields of mass communication, sociology, linguistics, especially by those critical discourse analysts whose research focus is to uncover the hidden ideologies and power relations in language. Those Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) practitioners claim that ideology is pervasively present in language and language is an embodiment of ideologies and power relations. After careful research into previous CDA studies, I found that early CDA researches mainly concentrated on political, economic, cultural, or conflict news discourses and natural disaster news discourse has attracted little attention until the occurrence of Sichuan Earthquake. But on the one hand, the related studies, be it on political, economic, or natural disaster news discourses, are prevalently case studies or contrastive studies on news discourses of the same event. On the other, the research methods utilized are neither comprehensive nor systematical.With reference to the previous achievement of CDA and studies on news discourses, and based on the characteristic of news discourses, this thesis proposes a set of analytic methods under the frame work of Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework which has been proved to be one of the most influential achievements in the field of CDA. The total10news discourses,5on Sichuan Earthquake and5on Japan’s Earthquake and Tsunami, are collected from the front-page of one of the most influential newspapers in the United States, The New York Times, with a time span of4days from the occurrence of the disaster. Through a contrastive qualitative and quantitative critical discourse analysis of the three dimensions, namely, discourse as text, discourse as discursive practice, and discourse as social practices, it aims to provide clearer insights into the relationship between language, ideology and power. Considering the top-down characteristic of the data collected, the analysis of linguistic features in the first dimension is divided into three levels, namely foregrounding in the text level, transitivity and theme, and modality in the sentence level, and wording in the word level. In the analysis of text production in the second dimension, discourse representation is the focus and in the third and final dimension, social, economic, and political background is provided to help reveal the interaction between language, ideology, and power relations.Through the contrastive analysis, the present research discovered that the news discourses on Sichuan Earthquake and Japan’s Earthquake are indeed not value-free. Different ideologies and power relations towards China and Japan do embed in the news discourses by The New York Times. It further reinforced the assumption of CDA that ideology is pervasively present in language, language can never be regarded as neutral and value-free, and that it is a social practice and an embodiment of ideologies and power relations. Second, the contrastive analysis of news discourses on similar events taking place in countries of different social, economic, and political backgrounds do assist in shedding light on uncovering the hidden ideologies and power relations. Third, the analytic methods proposed have been proved to be effective in analyzing natural disaster news discourses and can probably extend to analysis of discourses of other genres. Last but not the least, with the result achieved, it is hoped that the present study can help people, especially students, cultivate their critical thinking abilities which are of great significance in an era of information explosion.