Attitudinal Analysis Of US Media Towards Obama’s Three-Year Presidency

Appraisal Theory has been widely applied to the analysis of various discourses with its increasing development, while only a few relevant researches concern attitudinal resources in those news reports on Obama’s three-year presidency. Obama has been acquainted with the folks since the general election of the44th US President by the end of2008. The mass media have their own different opinions on the first African America President of the United States; some of them are positive while others are negative.The origins of Appraisal Theory can trace back to the deep understanding on the interpersonal meaning in language. Martin and White, after their15years of comprehensive study, have updated and modified this theory; moreover, they have published their scientific work The Language of Evaluation:Appraisal in English. Theoretically, appraisal is used as expressing authors’viewpoints, and in doing so to deliberately convey the value system of someone or the community specific.In these news reports about Obama, people can often grasp some affect, judgment expressions or interpersonal meaning more or less. With the guidance of Appraisal Theory, a newly-developed interpersonal functional theory, the accurate interpretation of interpersonal meaning in the news reports will be presented. In this study the author adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the distributional features of appraisal resources, and this research aims to reveal the characteristics of the realization of appraisal meaning from the perspectives of three sub-systems, namely, Attitude, Engagement and Graduation respectively. The researcher collects15pieces of news reports (15,624words) in2009,2010and2011randomly from6US media including Washington Post, New York Times, ABC News, CNN, TIME and USA Today as samples.According to the research, it is found that these news reports which seem very objective and neutral superficially imply abundant appraisal resources. There are totally851appraisal resources in the news reports, including424Attitude resources,244Engagement resources and183Graduation resources. In the Attitude system, positive resources account for62.03%while negative ones only take up37.97%. From the perspective of realizations, it is found that the number of Judgement resources is much more than that of Affect and Appreciation resources. Additionally, in the Judgement sub-system, the amount of positive Judgement resources is much more than that of negative ones (140:77), accounting for65%and35%respectively. It’s worth noting that most Judgement resources are expressed by "tokens" implicitly. In Engagement system, heteroglossic resources appear very frequently. Compared with the number of intra-vocalizations, the amount of extra-vocalizations is predominant, accounting for74.18%. Based on the analysis on the combination of Attitude and Engagement, the researcher reveal the following phenomena:first, among all the attitudes shown in the text, the judgement resources tend to be adhered to heteroglossic dialogue most; second, negative attitude resources, especially the negative judgement ones tend to be combined with heterogloss. In Graduation system, it is found that up-scaling in Force and Focus tends to combine with positive attitude, while down-scaling associates with negative attitude more frequently. So it can be perceived that the US media incline to do it completely when they praise Obama while have reservations when they criticize him. That is to say, the US media are caring and tolerant toward their President Obama; moreover, they are comparatively satisfied with his presidency in2009-2011.This study attempts to uncover the appraisal meaning in the news reports on US President Obama under the framework of Appraisal Theory, and the researcher expects that the study can not only provide a new theoretical perspective to interpret the news reports but also promote the development of research on the news reports in the field of foreign language studies. Meantime, it further enlarges its scope of exertion, validates the practicability and interpretive power of Appraisal Theory and offers some useful indications for its application in the news reports.