Critical Analysis On News Reports Of Libyan War Of American Media

As a tool of communication, language is closely connected with human beings and the society. Although linguistics traditionally argues that language should reflect the reality completely, it is by no means objective description of the facts because of its sociality. One of the purposes of CDA is to reveal the ideology neglected by readers and help them to reexamine the discourse in order to realize the subtle relationship between language and society and arouse their critical consciousness. As western media plays a more and more important role in the world today, the political news media particularly affect the global political and social life. By applying Fairclough’s Three-dimensional Framework as the analytical tool and a qualitative investigation, the thesis describes, interprets and explains the news reports selected from The New York Times with a view to testing the validity of Systemic Functional Grammar in news critical analysis, discussing America’s attitude towards Libyan War and power relationship among the three sides in the war and revealing the ideology hidden in the news discourse.The core part of the thesis is the description, interpretation and explanation of the news reports on Libyan War selected from The New York Times on the basis of Fairclough’s Three-dimensional Framework. In the stage of description, the characteristics of the wording for the three sides in the war are described and concluded separately from the aspects of classification, transitivity and modality. In the stage of interpretation, the news sources and intertextuality phenomenon are mainly analyzed. Lastly, the relationship between language in the news and ideology is explained through the analysis of the social context and situational context.The analysis indicates that The New York Times report the Libyan War objectively in general with credible news sources. However, the media obviously trended to report the movement of American official for the sake of America’s interests and security by shaping a just image of America and image of daring fighters against autarchy for Libyan rebels. While there were just a few reports on Qaddafi and his troops, at the same time, most of the reports are negative. The analysis proved that language not only reflects ideology but also affect, strengthen or reshape the latter. The findings of the thesis testifies the validity of the theoretical foundations and methodology, hence promote the critical reading of political news.