| In such a knowledge and information age where the international communicationand technology of mass media witness a rapid development, news discourse plays anincreasingly important role in ordinary people s life and even imposes significantinfluences on their thoughts, values and behaviors. During the past decade, there are anincreasing number of news reports about China in Western countries. In some sense, thismeans China gradually becomes a focus of the world. However, China s images indifferent media also deserve our particular attention. Moreover, considering America isthe most influential nation in the world, news reports from American prestigious newsmedia naturally become the favorable linguistic data. Obviously a critical discourseanalysis of news reports becomes crucial, thus attracting lots scholars at home andabroad.Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), as a crucial approach in the field of discourseanalysis, focuses on the relationship between ideologies, power and language with theemphasis on the impacts of social structures and contexts on discursive practices, eventsand texts. In this study, the author makes a critical analysis of nine China-related newssamples excerpt from the American influential news media: CNN (Cable NewsNetwork), New York Times and Wall Street Journal from a perspective ofpresupposition. These samples selected are political, social and economic news aboutChina from three news media s official online websites. To be specific, the study iscarried out through both qualitative and quantitative analyses of lexical andconstructional presupposition integrated with the study of news sources and modes ofnews reporting under Fairclough s three-dimensional framework, which consists ofdescription, interpretation and explanation.Based on presupposition, the study shows that both lexical and constructionalpresuppositions in political, social and economic news are overwhelmingly composedof negative presupposed massages, which, to a large extent, leads to China s negativeimages in these sample reports. However, reporters delicately selecting mostlyidentified reliable news resources and direct speech as the major mode of reporting alsodeserves our great attention. It is presupposition that offers a good method to adequatelyuncover those underlying ideologies. The study also explains the social determinants ofChina s image in sample reports are diverse and dynamic such as different socialstructures, the socio-historical context, China s current situation, American dominantvalue, Sino-U.S. relations and even the international environment etc. It is thus clear that news reports are always infiltrated by ideological prejudice andbias. Thus it is very necessary to foster readers critical awareness and developdialectical attitudes towards news reports. |
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