A Critical Discourse Analysis Of The Washington Post’s Reports On The PRISM Event

Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA), emerging in the 1970 s, is a critical approach to discourse analysis,which is widely used to study the non-literary discourse. News discourse, as a kind of public discourse, is the main analytical object of Critical Discourse Analysis. Through analyzing the linguistic features of discourse and the social backgrounds under which discourse is generated, Critical Discourse Analysis aims to uncover the ideologies and power relations hidden in language.The thesis chooses the news reports on the PRISM event of the United States as the research samples. The PRISM event refers to the disclosure of the PRISM program, which is a secret surveillance program approved by the U.S. government. The PRISM program was disclosed by Snowden, who revealed the top-classified documents about the PRISM program downloaded from Booz Allen to the media. According to the documents, the U.S. National Security Agency could get users’ individual information through the nine leading Internet companies. In the meantime, there are three parties which should be responsible for the event, namely, the U.S. government, the Internet companies and Booz Allen. To a certain degree, analyzing the news reports of the attitudes and stances of the three parties can shed light on the ideologies and power relations hidden in the reports.This study selects at random six news reports from The Washington Post as the analytical samples, which report respectively the attitudes and stances of the U.S. government, the Internet companies and Booz Allen towards the PRISM event. With Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Halliday’s systemic functional grammar as the theoretical foundation, the study adopts a combination of the quantitative method and the qualitative method to analyze the report samples. Through the analysis of the lexical choice, transitivity, intertextuality of the report samples and the social background of the PRISM event, the study aims to investigate:(1) How does The Washington Post report the attitudes and stances of the U.S. government, the Internet companies and Booz Allen respectively?(2) What ideologies are hidden in the news reports?(3) What power relations are reflected in these ideologies?The results of the study indicate:(1) When reporting the U.S. government’s attitude and stance, The Washington Post tends to use positive words and provide the specified news sources; however, when covering the attitudes and stances of the Internet companies and Booz Allen, The Washington Post is inclined to employ some negative words and offer the semi-specified news sources.(2) The Washington Post tries hard to assert the legality and necessity of the PRISM program, showing its support for the U.S. anti-terrorism acts. Besides, The Washington Post also condemns the Internet companies and Booz Allen’s behavior of distancing fiercely themselves from the PRISM event.(3) The ideologies reflect the complicated power relations between The Washington Post and the U.S. government, the Internet companies and Booz Allen. As the rise and fall of The Washington Post is closely related to the U.S. government, the newspaper, when reporting the PRISM event, chooses to stand in the position of the U.S. government. And for the reason that the Internet companies shirked its responsibility for the PRISM event to the U.S. government, The Washington Post denounces the Internet companies. At last, in order to embody its correct values and thus to preserve its interest, The Washington Post criticizes Booz Allen’s behavior of shirking its responsibility to its employee. It is these complicated power relations that make the ideologies embedded into the news reports.