A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Reports On The American Presidential Election

Critical discourse analysis is a field concerned with studying written and spokentexts in order to reveal the discursive sources of power, dominance, inequality and bias,and to examine how these discursive sources are maintained and reproduced withinspecific social, political and historical contexts.The concept of “critical” is quite important in the theory of critical discourseanalysis.“Critical” means that firstly discourse analysis aims to find the relationshipsbetween ideas, which are implied in the words, and social conditions in which ideas exist;secondly, discourse analysis is to expose certain connections, which people may beunconscious of, between language, power and ideology.CDA owes its theoretical basis and methodological resource to Halliday’s systemicfunctional grammar, based on which Fairclough raised a three-dimensional model forCDA.Fairclough raised three dimensions of discourse: discourse as text, as discursivepractice and as social practice. Accordingly, he promoted that the first step for CDA isdescription of the text, describing the linguistic features in text; the second one isinterpretation of the discursive practice, interpreting the relationship between text and theinteraction process of production, distribution and consumption; the last step isexplanation of the social practice, explaining the social background. In this way, thehidden ideology and power relations in discourse can be uncovered.This thesis picks up five sample reports on the American presidential election in2012from China Daily and Washington Post as the research text. Quantitative andqualitative analysis will be made in a comparative way by using of the three-dimensionalmodel，aiming to find out and compare the linguistic features, the ideology and powerrelations in the reports from China and America.The significance of this study is to provide a method of decoding the political newsreports in the light of critical discourse analysis. We can find out the ideology coded inthe discourse and how the discourse is used by powerful group to reinforce dominantideology, by describing the linguistic features and explaining its process of formation andsocial background. Finally, the public’s critical awareness in English language teachingand studying will be raised.