| Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), also termed as Critical Linguistics, is a newbranch of Linguistics. With social public discourses as its main study subjects, CDAtries to reveal the concealed ideology in discourse which the writers make meaningfulchoices of linguistic forms and structures. Through analysis of linguistic features aswell as social background, relationship between language, power and ideology isfurther discovered by CDA.News, as one of the main means of mass media, has attracted more and morescholars’ attention. Though claimed as objective and fair, news reports are in fact morethan simple descriptions of the events; they also convey all kinds of information, suchas attitude, social and cultural background, etc. In the meantime, news can directly orindirectly influence and even control the readers’ way of thinking. Recent researchesshow that CDA is an effective method to study ideology concealed in news discourses.Based on Fairclough’s Three-dimensional Framework and Halliday’sSystemic-Functional Grammar, the present study carries out a comparative discourseanalysis of news reports on the Third Plenary Session of the18thCommunist Party ofChina Central Committee in China Daily and Wall Street Journal (shorted as WSJhereafter) with the aim to illustrate the ideology hidden behind the news discourses. Bycreating a corpus of40news samples, among which20from China Daily and20fromWSJ, the comparative analysis of the present study is conducted from threestages--description stage, interpretation stage and explanation stage. At the descriptionstage, analytic tools like lexical choice and transitivity are explored. At theinterpretation stage, reporting mode and news source are explored in details while atthe explanation stage, focuses are moved to the social context in which the newsdiscourses are produced. Based on the study of news samples concerning the Third Plenum in theperspective of CDA, conclusions can be drawn as follows:(1) At the description stage,there exist huge differences in lexical choice and transitivity in news reports on theThird Plenum in China Daily and WSJ. China Daily prefers positive andcommendatory words in describing the concerned meeting and its decisions while WSJprefers negative and derogatory words. In addition, material processes are dominantlyused by China Daily and WSJ. The difference lies in the aspect that when choosing theActors of the material processes, China Daily prefers the Actors who have a closerelationship with the meeting while WSJ prefers the Actors who are indirectly relatedto the meeting. All these meaningful choices depend on the ideology of the reporters aswell as the attitude of the news agency.(2) At the interpretation stage, there also existstriking differences in reporting modes and news sources of the news reports in ChinaDaily and WSJ. In the aspect of reporting modes, China Daily uses a large number ofindirect discourses and it quotes more direct discourses than WSJ, which shows thatChina Daily is more objective than WSJ in this regard. From the perspective of newssource, it is obvious that both China Daily and WSJ try to be objective and crediblewith abundant exact news sources. The fact that WSJ use more semi-identified andunidentified news sources shows that its reports concerning the meeting are lesscredible and objective than the reports in China Daily.(3) At the stage of explanation,we can see both China Daily and WSJ serve for their governments’ interests and theirmainstream social ideologies. While reporting the Third Plenum, both China Daily andWSJ take the governments’ views and the mainstream social ideologies intoconsideration. |
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