A Multimodal Analysis On The Representation Of Social Participants In Chinese And American News Reports About Smog

With the advent of multimedia age,news reports have played a more important role in disseminating information as well as social culture.As important vehicle dissemination,news discourse is not limited to a single text,but is constructed by different modes,such as images,colors,sounds,etc.Those means break the singleness of language signs and make the expression of meaning richer and more complete.Therefore,multimodality provides a distinctive perspective for comprehensive understanding of news discourse.Smog related news is not only an effective channel for the public to acquire the weather information,as well as the causes of smog,the participation and action in smog control,but also deploy different semiotic resources to represent the complete meaning.The study applies van Leeuwen‘s(2008)social actor representation as theoretical framework.Ten smog-related news reports which are selected from China Daily and The Washington Post's websites are used as the data.Then,the represented participants in each news reports were categorized according to their function;the visual and verbal resources which relate representation of social participants were selected for multimodal analysis.The results show that a large coverage of reports in China Daily presents the occurrence of smog in various regions,and made analysis on the causes.In addition,the Chinese government has adopted a series of treatment measures,which shows that the Chinese government attaches great importance to environmental issues and the effectiveness and maturity of the treatment mechanism.In the visual part,China Daily presents people who are actively engaged in outdoor and entertainment scene,and shows that people responded positively to the government's call for low-carbon and green policies.Most of the images build an intimate and integrated atmosphere by using the medium shot and the frontal angle.On the contrary,in The Washington Post,linguistically a large coverage of news reports is to dramatize smog as a disaster with a huge health impact.In visual part,most of the images were taken with a detached view by use of long shot,oblique angle and indirect address,which makes an impression of seriousness and depression for viewers.The main reason for different reports on the same event is the different social and political environment and ideology.The current study expands the research field of news discourse and multimodality.In addition,it may help readers to have a comprehensive understanding of the implied message which were conveyed in different news reports of the same event,and fully grasped the overall meaning of multimodal discourse.