| News is the current information about events taking place in a particular area or in the country,which can be published in newspapers,played on radio,announced on TV,or issued on Internet.It plays an important role in modern society and becomes a window that people acquire knowledge about the world by virtue of its advantages such as timeliness and objectivity,etc.It is a well acknowledged fact in contemporary society that people turn to different sources of information like print and electronic media to keep themselves updated with the happenings of the world especially concerning the matters of national and international politics,security,and events like war.Hence,there is a need of a vibrant mass media that can keep people aware of the political and social activities of the world.As to link mass media and ideology,there is an accepted recognition that media hold the power to manipulate the masses.The public can be easily guided by information in news reports,especially by information provided by the official news reports,due to the influence of value orientation,cultural belief,etc..Thus,there is interpersonal meaning hidden in news discourse which usually tends to be misunderstood by the audience.Different media groups serve the vested interest of a certain “specialized class” of a society by propagating“false consciousness” among the viewers.Free media is imperative for a flourishing democracy.It helps people to gather information that otherwise would be difficult to gather.Moreover,free media often serves as a watchful guardian for the people of any country.In American,media is regarded as the fourth pillar of the state after parliament,executive,and judiciary.The freedom of media and the right to have an access to information is well protected by the constitution of United Sates that serves as a legislative framework for American media and outlaws anything against freedom and democracy and security of America.America has long held itself up as a model of freedom and democracy and it is often proud of its freedom of media.However,the country is also facing many domestic conflicts.Likewise,American media is often charged with media bias and alleged to spread false consciousness among the masses by different sections of the society.Based on these,this thesis aims to reveal how the two media use language to implicitly express their true attitude and position towards Trump's immigration policies through a contrastive study of interpersonal meaning in news reports on Trump's immigration policies in CNN and Fox News in America,so as to further demonstrate the authenticity of the two media' parties bias reported by foreign media and to prove the essence of news organizations: beyond the ideology,any news organization has to perform their own political responsibilities and obligations.Due to great importance of news reports,they are always used as research data.However,although many researches on news reports are done from the perspective of discourse analysis and functional grammar,most of the studies just focus on the analysis of wordings features and structures of news reports.There are few studies that is conducted from the aspect of Appraisal theory to make a contrastive study of news reports provided by two different news channels in America.Hence,this thesis is conducted from three perspectives: Attitude,Engagement and Graduation within the framework of appraisal theory to explore the differences in interpersonalmeaning contained in the news reports in CNN and Fox News and to investigate the reasons that there are differences in interpersonal meaning in the news reports in CNN and Fox News.The thesis is based on 60 news reports on Trump's immigration policies respectively collected from the official website of CNN and Fox News in America within the theoretical framework of appraisal theory to examine the distribution of each appraisal resource and to explore the differences in interpersonal meaning of appraisal resource in the news reports.In this thesis,“immigration” “wall” “border” are used as the searching word in CNN and Fox News and30 reports are selected from each news outlet,using the analytical tool UAM Corpus Tool 3.3 to have a manual annotation of Attitude,Engagement and Graduation resources in the sample discourse.Qualitative and quantitative research method are used to make a contrastive study of the annotated resources.This thesis focuses on a contrastive study of features of appraisal resources and the differences in interpersonal meaning embodied by appraisal resources,as well as the causes leading to the differences in interpersonal meaning in news reports on Trump's immigration policies in CNN and Fox News.The three research questions are as follows:(1)What are features of interpersonal meaning in news reports on Trump's immigration policies in CNN and Fox News ?(2)What are differences in interpersonal meaning in news reports on Trump's immigration policies in CNN and Fox News?(3)What are causes of the differences in interpersonal meaning in news reports on Trump's immigration policies in CNN and Fox News?Through the analysis of overall distributions of three appraisal subsystems in the news reports on Trump's immigration policies in CNN and Fox News,it is found that interpersonal meaning of appraisal resources in the news reports of CNN and Fox News has the three following features: firstly,both the reporters of CNN and Fox News lay more emphasis on the appreciated evaluations rather than judgments on Trump's immigration policies.Secondly,Both of the reporters of CNN and Fox News tend to highlight the objectivity of their reports as they tend to quote others' opinions to make their views attributed.Thirdly,both the reporters of CNN and Fox News prefer to attach importance on the adjustment of attitude strength.They tend to make their attitudes on the immigration policies stronger or weaker to meet the needs of their own target readers and the standard of news writing at the same time.On this basis,this study moves on to the analysis of distribution of each subcategory of three appraisal subsystems from the micro-perspective.Thus,it is concluded that there are two major differences in interpersonal meaning in CNN and Fox News.The one is the differences in attitude and stance.The reporters of CNN express more negative and pessimistic attitude on the immigration policies.Its attitude and stance are more exact and stronger.While the reporters of Fox News express more positive and optimistic attitude implicitly and its attitude and stance are more vague and weaker on the whole.Specifically,the reporters of CNN focus on the negative emotional evaluations on social values of Trump's immigration policies and the coverage for people's unwillingness to pass and carry out the policies.They question president Trump's capability of fulfilling his previous campaign promise to build the border wall and doubt whether it is normal and proper to build the border wall.Besides,they also worry about the serious impacts of the immigration policies on bipartisan politics and cultural diversity in American.By contrast,the reporters of Fox News are prone to validate the propriety of the immigration policies based on social norms or law rules.The reporters of Fox News dedicateto prove that the immigration policies are constitutional and worthy to be carried out.They lay more emphasis on the coverage for people's satisfaction with Trump's immigration policies.The other is the differences in alignment between writers and readers.The reporters of CNN focus more on persuasion and instruction to their target readers,but the reporters of Fox News tend to highlight the description of objective information,taking no account of the establishment of alignment with its target readers.Furthermore,it is concluded dependent on the deployment of Heteroglossic resources that the reporters of CNN dedicate to create a wider dialogic space between writers and readers.Specifically,the reporters of CNN are more inclusive to different voices and they tend to avert the responsibilities for the credibility of the information they reported.Besides,they attempt to maintain strong alignment with their target readers and with attributed views in a way of showing agreement with alternative opinions and making referenced views justifiable.By contrast,the reporters of Fox News tend to insist their own viewpoints through contracting the dialogic space with their readers and to exclude different voices from their value position through negating and countering the views that are negative to the policies.The causes of differences in interpersonal meaning are summarized as discourses roles,value orientation and cultural belief.To align with their target readers and increase the credibility of the news reports,the reporters of CNN act as an organizer to convey the will of authorities or institutions in the role of spokesman or speaker,so that they tend to avert the responsibility for the information they reported and to create a wilder dialogic space between writers and readers.Whereas the news reports in Fox news are more informative and objective.In order to highlight their own standpoint and strengthen the objectivity of the news reports,reporters act as an invlover so as to to negate or counter different viewpoints form theirs and directly engage in the coverage for the policies.The value orientation here refers to the reports readiness and interest of news organizations.For CNN,it dedicates to write news that can expose inappropriate part of Trump and his administration so as to focus more on the negative coverage for Trump's immigration policies while Fox News would like to write favorable coverage for the Republican Party,so it tend to focus on the positive judgments and appreciations of Trump's immigration policies,which meets the demand of their target readers.In addition,the inherent cultural belief of news organizations has an deep influence on journalists.Due to the advocacy of politically correct principle and bias against Republican Party for CNN,its reporters focus more on negative coverage for the impact of the immigration policies on American social life and cultural diversity.Whereas due to Fox News favors for traditional values and supports the Republican Party,its reporters prefer to focus on positive coverage for propriety and social valuation of the policies.This study has the following research significance: through a contrastive study of interpersonal meaning in news reports of CNN and Fox News,on the one hand,theoretically,the Appraisal theory is proved as an effective theoretical tool with which the interpersonal meaning in news reports can be revealed and the field of application of Appraisal theory is expanded;on the other hand,practically,this study can give readers some enlightenment about how to make evaluative reading for news reports with the Appraisal theory,that is,how to find out the interpersonal meaning hidden in news texts.It also gives journalists some references about how to express their attitude and stance,align their target readers and position themselves in news texts by utilizing Appraisal resources.Besides,as news reports is playing an important role in English reading teaching,it is very helpful to English reading teaching that English learners can learn the way to make evaluative reading for news material from this study.The limitations of this study are as follows: first,the research data is relatively small.There are altogether 60 related news reports respectively collected from the official website of CNN and Fox News,which are not enough to validate the findings accurate and persuasive;second,the research results are not enough convincing because the number of appraisal resources in news reports of CNN and Fox News is not equivalent.The number of Appraisal resources in Fox News is smaller than that of appraisal resources in CNN;third,the annotation of Appraisal resources is not enough objective.The statistics is conducted with the assistance of UAM Corpus Tool,but the Appraisal resources are annotated manually.Some resources will have different meanings when understood from the different aspects,so it is hard to differentiate each category within each system;last but not least,the research may not summarize the causes that lead to differences in interpersonal meaning comprehensively.The more causes that cover different aspects of the differences in interpersonal meaning in news reports,including social politics,institution,etc.should be explored in later studies. |
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