A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Bbc News Reports On World Economic Forum

With the development of social economy and globalization, economic events have attracted the most attention from global media to be their headlines. As one of the most important public discourses in the current society, the reporters of news reports have always claimed that the discourses given by them are fair, objective and transparent, especially the political discourses. Nevertheless, through extensive reading, we find that various personal factors such as the attitudes and political preferences of reporters have been deeply hidden not only in political discourses, but also in financial news reports. And media in different countries make every effort to impact their readers’ unconscious information acceptance and then further change their ideology in the process of reading. Therefore, in the research field of English discourse, it would be practically meaningful to study the reporters’writing purpose and power preferences, from the perspective of critical discourse analysis, concealed behind the news reports about economic events.This thesis tries to use the financial news reports released by BBC after the year2008during the World Economic Forum as its data and tries to uncover reporters’ideology in news headlines and bodies. Employing Halliday’s Systemic-functional Grammar and Three-dimensional Model proposed by Fairclough in critical linguistics as its theoretical framework, it also combines the qualitative with quantitative method to analyze from the following three levels, the textual level, the discursive level and the social practice level. At the first level, lexical classification and transitivity will be used as the analytic tools in order to dig out the unique language characteristics often used in the economic news reports. At the discursive level, it aims to understand the influence of the news source and modes of news reporting on the production and structure of financial news reports from the perspective of intertextuality. And from the angle of the employment of modality, reporters’judgment and personal willingness will be discussed. Lastly, combined with the above analysis, the impact of a certain social background on the financial news reports and the implicit ideology will be found at the social practice level.From the study, it would be easy for us to find that the financial news reports are not that fair and transparent as they declared to be. Acting as a neutral and objective role, the vocabulary and sentence structure are always the best option for reporters to express their personal views and attitudes, which is a good way not only to assure the credibility of the event, but also to better protect the social status of the media and reports. In addition, through the comparison between the application of the aspects such as words and modality in the economic news reports produced by BBC about developed countries and developing countries, we would know that the news reports given by influential media have become the important tool for the governments and authorities to spread the inherent ideology. In the meantime, they also show the prejudice that the western media hold toward developing countries and the changes of their attitudes with the development of those countries in various aspects. Thus, this thesis will boost the development of the teaching of English news reports as well as improve the awareness of public critical readings, which will provide the theoretical foundation for the development of the teaching of English news reports and for the better understanding of news reports for English lovers.