A Critical Discourse Analysis Of American News Reports On The18~th National Congress Of The CPC

News, as an important means of communication, is not as it claims to be atransparent medium, which can report news events objectively and impartially. As amatter of fact, news discourse from mass media becomes a key tool for the social interestand political right groups, therefore it is social and of ideological tendency. ThroughAmerican news reports on the18thNational Congress of the CPC in the discipline ofcritical discourse analysis, the thesis aims to investigate the dialectic relationshipbetween language, power and ideology and expose the intentions of American ideologieson China.The data of this research comes from three American mainstream media CNN,Time and The New York Times; specifically “As major Chinese leadership change begins,questions swirl” in CNN,“Opening meeting, China’s president warns of risks” in TheNew York Times, and “Code red: China’s leadership transition begins amid pomp andsecurity” in Time. They are respectively published from Nov8to Nov9,2012.Employed Fairclough’s three-dimensional model, the analysis of the news reportsare conducted at three levels: text, discursive practice and social practice. At the textuallevel, guided by Halliday’s SFG and Martin’s appraisal theory, the analysis tools liketransitivity, classification, and transformation are employed to examine the linguisticfeatures in the news reports. At the discursive level, the theory of intertextuality isintroduced and used as the major means of implementation—speech reporting modesand speech reporting verbs to analyze the news resources in detail. At the social level,the thesis explores the deep reasons of linguistic choices in American news reports fromthe relevant political, cultural and institutional factors.Through the qualitative and quantitative study of American news reports on the18thNational Congress of the CPC, it can be concluded that language is not neutral media. The news reports are not as objective as they claim. The hidden ideologies arealways embedded in these unbalanced reports, especially in American news reports onChina. At the same time, they cast a typical negative image of China to the readers inorder to influence readers’ attitude towards China. People should read news reportsfrom critical perspective, only in this way can they dig out the truth hidden in the newsreports. This study again proves the viewpoint of CDA: language is a social practice; itis inevitably determined by the underlying ideology.