A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On The Ferguson Unrest

As a young but dynamic approach in linguistic investigations, CDA is used to uncover the implicit relationship among language, power and ideology in society, especially through analyzing the public news discourses.Media discourse, as one kind of news discourses, is one of the main channels for people to get information. And news reports are often used as text sources in CDA studies, because news language, though invariably supposed to be objective, true and fair, inevitably reflects the reporters’ ideologies, value and opinions, and to some extent, it can help reproduce the readers’ viewpoints to the world as well.The Ferguson unrest, as a big event in the U.S in 2014 was triggered by the case of a white police officer shooting dead a black young man, and later developed into a large scale of conflicts between the black protesters and the police. It inherently involves the issues of racism, human rights and judicial justice, causing a huge uproar in the world. China, as a country often wrongly accused of abuses of human rights by Western countries also presented a large number of reports on this unrest.This thesis has conducted quantitative and qualitative text analyses of three news reports, using Fairclough’s three-dimensional model with Halliday’s SFG as analytical tool. The three pieces of news from which our data were selected are about the unrest on 25 of November in 2014, which then received the largest amount of comments in the website news reports of China Daily, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Because of a wide circulation and far-reaching influence in China and America, their news reports can be considered in general representative enough of the political positions and ideologies of China and America.Firstly, detailed analyses have been conducted in three major stages. In the description stage, this paper investigates lexical choice and transitivity to analyze the ideologies reflected in the three news reports. In the interpretation stage, this thesis investigates the inter-textuality by analyzing the modes of speech, showing that reporters skillfully select the appropriate modes of speech to convey their own ideologies. And in the explanation stage, this thesis has figured out the social context, cultural and historical factors behind the discourse practice.Secondly, differences between Chinese and American news reports have been found to lie in the different ideologies on protesters, police, the U.S. government and the grand jury. And they are summarized in two aspects. In the first aspect the CD reporter focused on describing the whole process of the event, showing sympathy to and support for the black protesters, who are strongly against the racism and the inequality of the judicious system and fight for their equal rights; the CD reporter described police as tough and inhuman and criticized their inhuman and indiscriminate arrest; and also the CD reporter expressed a certain degree of irony to the U.S. government, whereas the WP reporter set up a negative and criminal image of the protesters, portraying them as the instigators of conflicts and the culprits who undermined the social harmony. His attitude to the protesters is hostile, negative and biased; he also believed that the American police are in a passive state in the conflicts and described them as the well-trained troops. Meanwhile, the WP reporter cited many speeches from the government officials and the residents of Ferguson to establish a positive image of the U.S. government officials, who are engaged in appeasing the protesters, raising people’s confidence in the government, and speaking in favor of the government for its ability to actively solve the social contradictions.These different ideologies reflected in the CD and WP reports on the main participants of the unrest are due to the social, historical and political factors.The second aspect of differences have been found in the comparison between WP and WSJ reports, being that although WP and WSJ reporters hold a negative and condemning attitude to the black protesters, the WSJ reporter possesses a even stronger negative and hostile attitude to the protesters, describing them as the wrongdoers engaged in acts of terrorism and lawlessness, whereas the American police’s behaviors are regarded legal. On the other hand, the WP reporter, to some extent, expressed his critical attitude to the police who indiscriminately arrested the protesters, and focused himself on shaping a positive image of the U.S. government. However, the WSJ reporter cited lots of words to justify the police’s actions and actively maintained the existing judicial system.All in all, the three reporters of CD, WP and WSJ displayed the power inequalities and implicit messages that are hidden in the news discourses, and they succeeded in conveying their ideologies to the readers imperceptibly, reconstructing the readers’ ideologies. So it follows that although some media always say that their news reports reflect the facts the most objectively, it is impossible for any media to achieve complete objectivity without being affected by the ideologies and values behind them.