A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Reports On Racial Discrimination In The New York Times

Since the 1970 s,critical discourse analysis(CDA)has become an influential branch of discourse analysis in modern linguistic research.By analyzing the news text,CDA is widely used to uncover the ideologies hidden in news discourse,to explore the relationships among language,power and ideology,and to reveal the influence of two-way interaction between discourse and ideology.News discourse,as one kind of public discourse,is the main channel for people to know about the world.However,news reports are not always as objective and impartial as they are claimed.They are inevitably influenced by various factors such as society,history,culture and news writers' values.By using different types of language,news writers often present their own ideologies or values in news reports in a hidden way,and this will finally influence readers' ideas and ideologies.This study chooses ten news reports from the New York Times as data for analysis.These ten reports focus on two cases: a white policeman shot a black man in August 2014 and a Chinese-American policeman shot a black man in November 2014.The study attempts to discuss how news writers employ language to hide their ideologies and affect reader's cognition to the events.It adopts Fairclough's three-dimensional model as the framework and Halliday's systemic-functional grammar as the analytic tool.All the selected ten reports will be analyzed at three levels.On the level of text analysis,this study employs lexical classification,transitivity and transformation to analyze the linguistic features of texts.On the level of discourse practice,this study focuses on examining the news source and reporting modes.On the level of social practice,this study explains the choice of discourse representation and the ideologies embedded in news discourse from the perspectives of social context and institutional context.This study tests and verifies the applicability and feasibility of CDA in the research on reports of racial discrimination.By analyzing the influence of the two-way interaction between discourses and ideologies,this study has revealed anumber of findings.First,although the New York Times strives to be objective and neutral when reporting the two police shooting events,the news reports inevitably show the protection of the white policeman.Secondly,there is a dialectical relationship among language,power,and ideology through the analysis of related cases.Finally,the choice of language in news reports is influenced by social ideology,and news writers embed their ideological implications in news reports to influence readers' ideologies.This study has three implications for future study.First,teachers should raise their students' critical reading awareness in their classroom teaching,because news reports are always ideology-driven and the report is not always as objective and trustworthy as it asserts.Second,owing to the ignorance of developing students' critical reading ability in class,teachers should provide their students with the methods to cultivate their critical reading ability and offers critical reading procedures when dealing with news discourse analysis.Finally,this study broadens the range of CDA study,and helps the readers to recognize the ideologies hidden in news reports.