Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On Sino-japanese Relations In Chinese And American News Media

Sino-Japanese relations have always been the focus for news media at home and abroad. China and Japan have sparred over matters for many times such as worshiping of Yasukuni Shrine and the Diaoyu islands. In the browsing of the news reports from the main media in America and China, the author finds that there are many dissimilarities in tendencies on the same issue between American and Chinese reports. It’s known that as news reports facing the public, they should be fair, impartial and transparent without bias. But the fact is not the case. Reporters with different ideological backgrounds and from different countries hide their respective purposes and tendencies in the usage of language in the reports. So it’s necessary for us to apply an effective analytical instrument to analyze and contrast these reports so as to explore deeper things behind the surface of words. Thereby we can reveal the inner relationship between language, power and ideology and thus give the readers an apparent and fair angle of view as well as improve their discernment ability of news reading to form their own viewpoints.Put forward by Roger Flower and Gunther Kress in 1979, the critical discourse analysis(hereafter referred to as CDA) provides us an effective analytical instrument. Based on Halliday’s systematic functional grammar(hereafter referred to as SFG), CDA becomes more and more authentic and objective with more than 30 years’ development. Following the three steps: description, interpretation and explanation proposed by Fairclough, CDA makes analysis of discourse especially public discourses to reveal the ideological, power relations and so on. The present paper applies the analytical dimensions of CDA and combines qualitative and quantitative analyses to investigate the news reports on Sino-Japanese relations in American and Chinese media with the aim to reveal the reporters’ intentions and purposes. What’s more, the present paper integrates critical metaphor analysis(hereafter referred to as CMA) put forward by Charteris-Black in 2004 as an assistant analytical instrument to analyze discourse to get a relatively comprehensive result.It’s found that the American and Chinese reports show much influence of ideology and beneficial relations in many language aspects such as modality, vocabularies or speeches. In the metaphor analyses section, we can notice that influenced by different cultures, the American and Chinese reporters have many similarities in the choice of metaphors, but the differences are also obvious. So the news reports cannot be 100 percent objective and the readers will never know the panorama of one event from only one report in one society. More often, news reports can be seen as “fictional stories” divorced from the event itself made up by reporters. Besides, the CDA’s shortcomings and suggestions for its future development are briefly discussed likewise. The present paper also has much reference significance in helping the public form critical thinking and critical view of reading of English students when reading news reports.