Critical Discourse Analysis Of Newsweek News Reports On China

Peace and development are the theme of contemporary times. After the Second World War, the new technological revolution changed the economic situation of the contemporary society and the world profoundly. Currently, with the world’s smooth economic development and each country’s increasing living standards, every country is sparing no efforts to improve its international image and global impact which are vitally important to it.News reports have been playing an important role in modern international media. Human beings get to know everything about any countries through news reports, such as the politics, economics, culture, military, education, etc. It is believed that news should be impartial, fair and objective. In other words, news reports should not express any subjective feelings or opinions, which may mislead the readers’ thinking toward the outside world. In the international society, human beings mainly get to know other countries through news reports. However, owing to historical problems, political ideology, interest’s conflicts and other reasons, the American media have always reported false news on China. Those false reports toward China often are embedded with the subjective views of the editor who has a stubborn and negative attitude toward China, which has done great harm to the image of China and provided foreign readers with a distorted factual basis. Therefore, the analysis toward the foreign media’s news reports on China is especially important. Besides, it is necessary that something should be done to avoid the false reports against China in order to maintain a positive Chinese image.Newsweek, American mainstream online news websites, is an all-dimensional news websites which covers a wide range of aspects, including domestic and international events, business, science and technology, society, arts and entertainment. Not to mention, its political comments have won numerous praises in America. However, as always, some Newsweek reports on China have something inconformity to the facts. Some reports even intentionally attack China and Chinese people, which does great harm to Chinese international image. This paper is a critical discourse analysis of the recent ten years’ reports on Chinese important events from the Newsweek. The writer has applied the systemic-functional grammar’s methodologies into the analysis. It has four tools of analysis:Classification, Transitivity, Modality, and Transformation. Then the writer has done the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the news discourse and reach the conclusion that American media’s negative attitude in ideology toward China via a biased and prejudiced perspective when they are reporting Chinese events. In order to cope with this kind of negative reports, the writer points out that the government should take the corresponding measures.