A Dramatistic Rhetorical Critique Of CNN’s Reports On Violent Terrorist Incidents

In recent years, the world’s overall situation is relatively stable, but in some areas there are still many uncertainties, which give terrorists an opportunity to constantly create disturbances at home and abroad. They not only bring great loss to the community, but also continually stimulate people’s psychological endurance, which has caused extreme panic and anxiety. However, we get to know a violent terrorist incident mostly through the news media. News reports as a unique form of discourses have become one of the main ways to transmit information, and also a window for people to understand and perceive the whole world. Currently, the study of news coverage of violent incidents is mostly from the perspective of economy,politics and military affairs, while the study of dramatistic rhetorical criticism of this kind of discourse is quite limited.The dramatistic rhetorical criticism was first proposed by American rhetorician Kenneth Burke. Burke’s dramatism is a way of rhetorical criticism to study human motivational behaviors and language, and by studying the motivation of people’s behavior to explore how people influence others’ attitudes through language. He believes that man is a rhetorical animal, so human language and behavior can be studied rhetorically. Rhetoric can be said to be everywhere, and it plays an important role in every aspect of our lives. Especially facing the globalization trend, we want to make a rhetorical analysis which has a great impact on a country’s exchange and cooperation, publicity, and even the national status in the world.This thesis will take the theory of rhetorical criticism as a framework, and choose the American news media CNN’s coverage of violent terrorist incidents as corpus,and with the application of the pentadic criticism and the theory of identification,which can help us to understand the different ideologies and the media interests which are implied in the coverage of American media CNN. Meanwhile we try to reveal how CNN delivers its value orientation to the audience through the newsdiscourse. This thesis collects 5 relevant reports from CNN media on violent terrorist incidents, and from the view of the five elements in pentad and their relationship among the ratios to study the nature and the role of these elements in CNN’s reports.Meanwhile, it also studies the identification strategy adopted in the reports from the view of the rhetorical situation and rhetorical content so as to explore how the rhetor uses these strategies to achieve identification with the audience. In addition, this thesis tries to parse the following three questions: first, what motivation lies behind American media CNN’s reports on violent terrorist incidents? second, how does the rhetor convince his motivation implied in the discourse to the public, and achieve identification with the audience? third, how can we understand the relation between the coverage of violent terrorist incidents and national image, interests and value through the pentadic analysis and identification theory?Through the research, we can find out the hidden political motives and the state ideology it represents in CNN’s news reports. The analysis of the five elements of the violent terrorist incidents reported by American media CNN’s journalist makes us understand more clearly its political positions and attitude on terrorism, and how the rhetor achieves identification with the audience. Through the comparative analysis, we find that the CNN’s attitude and positions on the same kind of incidents are obviously different in its reports. Thus we will have further understanding of different countries’ ideologies, value orientations and know better about the relations among different countries.Dramatistic rhetorical criticism is an effective tool for the analysis of such kind of news discourse, which not only can help people generally understand human symbolic behaviors, but also can enrich the perspective of rhetorical criticism.