A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On Hong Kong Occupy Central From China Daily And Washington Post

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which emerged in the 1970s, has gone through a rapid development in the recent decades. Critical discourse analysis aims to unveil the hidden ideologies and power relations behind discourses to prove the subjectivity and the tendency to disclose the writing purposes, and further explore the political views and stances which the interest group represents. In this thesis, the news reports on the Hong Kong Occupation Central in 2014 from China Daily and Washington Post are selected, using Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model as the analytic framework and M.A.K. Halliday’s systemic functional grammar as the analytic tool to prove whether ideological meanings and power relations can be implied in seemingly objective and neutral news discourse and to explore how language is employed by news producers and how ideological implications come into being.From the critical analysis of the selected sample news reports, we can come to the following conclusions:The seemingly fair news discourses subtly express the views and ideological tendencies and the power relations which the specific.interest groups represent. First, news reporters usually employ different words with specific meanings to express their opinions on a certain event. Second, as to modality, direct and indirect speech reporting are deliberately reorganized and used to convey the journalists’ intentions and attitudes toward the reported events as well as the views and standpoints of the power groups they represent. Third, American reporters are more likely to employ nominalization and passivation in the transformation system than their Chinese counterparts. The elements of selected corpus are, to some degree, deleted, substituted, reorganized, they manage to convey the standpoints of the power groups they represent.News producers skillfully make use of various linguistic resources to express, often in a very implicit way, their own views and standpoints regarding a certain event as well as those of the parties involved in that event. Therefore, it would be practically meaningful to study the reporters’writing purpose and power preferences which are otherwise concealed behind the news reports from the perspective of critical discourse analysis.