A Contrastive Study Of News Reports On 19th CPC National Congress In Chinese And American Mainstream Media In Light Of Three-dimensional Model

Critical Discourse Analysis regards language as a social practice,emphasizes the contexts of language use,and aims to reveal the interrelation among language and power,society and ideology.Since 1980 s,Critical Discourse Analysis has become a useful method in analyzing news discourse,and has provided a comprehensive perspective to study the differences of implied ideology in news reports from different countries.News discourse seems to be objective,but it is not totally so because it is affected by many factors,such as ideology and power,author’s attitude and social background.The Critical Discourses Analysis of news reports can discover language features,and expose power,ideology and bias implied in discourse,which can be helpful to improve the readers’ critical reading abilities.This paper makes a contrastive analysis of 50 pieces of news reports selected respectively from Chinese and American mainstream media,totaling 100 pieces of news on the 19 th CPC National Congress.Based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model,two corpora are established for a critical discourse analysis through quantitative and qualitative analysis in order to reveal the implying ideology and power.According to the three-dimensional theoretical model,this paper starts from the description level,to the interpretation level and then the explanation level for data analysis.At the descriptive level,linguistic characteristics of the media in the two countries are analyzed in terms of lexical choice.At the interpretative level,the implicit attitudes of news reports are studied in regard to the data got from the descriptive level;and at the explanatory level,the differences in implicit power and ideology between the mainstream media in China and the United States are explained from the aspects of social context and political context,etc.The study finds that the mainstream media in China and the United States do have different ideological tendencies in reporting on the 19 th CPC National Congress.Chinese and American journalists convey different ideologies by choosing different words.The mainstream media in China pays more attention to the 19 th CPC National Congress itself,including the report content,China’s future development,relations with the world and so on.They are optimistic and full of hope for the future.The mainstream media in the United States pays more attention to China’s main leadership,China’s future development trend,China’s corruption problem and its relationship with the United States,which tend to express the distrustful attitude towards the contents of the 19 th CPC National Congress.