A Contrastive Analysis Of News Sources Of Speech Reporting In The Reports On China-Japan Diaoyu Islands Dispute

News media plays a very important role in the present world and news reports functions as an indispensable source from which we get to know what has happened or is happening in the world everyday. As a result news study has become a very important field of discourse analysis as well. This thesis attempts to make a contrastive analysis of news sources of reported speech in the recent reports of China-Japan Diaoyu Islands dispute by China Daily and Washington Post. The main aim is to reveal the hidden ideological implications and power relationships of both newspapers on this political event after a series of comparisons on news sources. Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework of critical discourse analysis is adopted as the theoretical analytical tool for the whole thesis.The analysis finds that although the two newspapers share some similarities in their use of news sources in the reports, China Daily is inclined to quote from Chinese experts rather than Japanese experts as compared with Washington Post, and most of the news sources in China Daily are clearly identified with names and other specific information about the sources. In contrast, Washington Post quotes more from Japanese government officials and uses much more unspecific or unidentifiable news sources than China Daily.The main conclusion of this thesis is that the two newspapers report the same event in different reporting styles and the ways they quote from different news sources are closely related to their different political stances and positions in this territorial dispute. We hope that the analysis in this thesis will help readers to get a better understanding of the nature of news reports and get to know that there is no such a thing as purely "neutral" or "objective" news reporting and that there are always certain ideologies and power relationships behind any specific news discourse. Besides, the different positions and attitudes taken by Chinese government and the United States’in this dispute will also be revealed in this thesis.