A Comparative Study Of The Russian And American News Reports On Turkey's Downing Of A Russian Plane

Since the 1980s, due to the rapid development of mass media, the influence of the public discourse on the construction of the society as well as on people's thoughts has been getting stronger. And this has aroused a growing interest and attention from linguists, especially discourse analysts. Under this background and being inspired by philosophy, sociology and other related disciplines, critical discourse analysis(CDA) came into being. CDA is based on Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar and its goal is to reveal the dialectic relationship among language, power and ideology through critically analyzing discourse in its social and historical context. Critical discourse analysis has been widely applied to various kinds of texts or discourses, such as speeches, debates and news. This thesis is intended to be a comparative analysis of the Russian and American news reports on the downing of a Russian plane by Turkish air force to reveal their different points of view and ideological motivations.16 news reports from Russian and American media are selected for the present study. All of them focus on the recent downing of the Russian plane by Turkey. This critical analysis is conducted within the framework of Fairclough's Three-Dimensional model with the analytic tools based on Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics. Through critical analysis, the thesis reveals how the Russian and American media insensibly express their different attitudes and thus convey to the readers their different ideologies. After reading the thesis, hopefully the readers will approach the news reports critically instead of naturally in the future.At the end of the analysis, we conclude that since language is a system which offers the speakers many choices and the usage of it is largely determined by its social function as well as the speaker's purposes, news reporters are able to convey their ideologies and thoughts insensibly through careful wording, transitivity, transformation and so on based on their different social and ideological backgrounds. If the readers read these news reports with a critical mind, it is by no means difficult for them to grasp the thoughts and ideologies hidden behind the reports.