A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On Chinese Turning To Plastic Surgery In New York Times

Critical discourse analysis is first arising in British in the late1970s, by detecting thelinguistic features and the social-historical context, it aims to explore the hidden ideology. Inrecent years, it develops rapidly and many scholars pay much attention to it. Most scholarsattach their attention to media discourse, such as political event, economic report, leader’sspeech and so on. This research choose news about more and more Chinese choose to takeplastic surgeries published in New York Times, which aims to reveal how American mediareport this phenomenon and to find the hidden ideology embedded behind the news.In this research, the author will take Fairclough’s three---dimensional model andHalliday’s system functional grammar to analysis the news choose from New York Times.Fairclough argues that news consists of three levels: text, discursive practice and socialpractice. On the level of text, transitivity and lexical classification are employed to analyzethe linguistic features of news; on the level of discursive practice, the sources and modes ofthe discourse representation are analyzed; on the level of social practice, the social, historyand culture factors are taken into account in order to reveal the hidden ideology.After analysis the news, the author makes a conclusion that news are claimed asobjective and fair, but as a product of social practice, it is influenced by ideology inevitably.The choice of language can reflect the ideology and social relations. Although New YorkTime do not use the mocking words, but it gets full use of linguistics means to report thisphenomenon to show its attitude---in order to get a better appearance or become famous,Chinese people are willing to spend a lot of money to have the plastic surgery even at the risk of their lives.This research also proves that this analysis method is effective to examine news reportand find the hidden ideology. Besides, it can be introduced into English teaching. It will helpstudents raise critical language awareness and avoid being manipulated by media.