A Critical Discourse Analysis Of English News Reports On The Missing Malaysian Plane MH370 In China And Malaysia

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was a scheduled international passenger flight in the early morning of March 8th, 2014, from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China. However, in no more than an hour after its take-off, the plane lost contact with the controllers in Malaysia. Because of the mysteriousness and the wide range of influence, this accident of MH370 has attracted the attention of media in different countries all over the world.This study, carried out within the analytical framework of the three-dimensional model proposed by Fairclough, is a critical discourse analysis of English news reports on the missing Malaysian plane MH370 in China and Malaysia. 16 news reports on the missing plane selected from China Daily and New Straits Times are analyzed. By analyzing the news discourses from the dimensions of description, interpretation and explanation, it is found that the linguistic features and the inter-textuality of the news discourses selected from China Daily and New Straits Times have no great difference. Two newspapers reported the issue of MH370 objectively and neutrally because of the friendly political and the interdependently economic relationship between China and Malaysia as well as the limited news resources of MH370.