A Contrastive Critical Analysis Of The Reports On George Floyd’s Death In CNN And Fox News

In terms of the popularity,circulation and different points of view on the same event,the thesis selects each 25 discourses about Floyd’s death with time limited from June 15 to July 15 on the official websites of “ CNN” and “ Fox News” as the research corpus.In the course of the analytical process,regarding Fairclough’s three-dimensional model as the theoretical framework,the thesis embraces the method of quantitative and qualitative analysis to make a contrastive critical analysis of the reports on George Floyd’s death in CNN and Fox News.The thesis is intended to solve the following three questions:(1)What are the differences in the reports on George Floyd’s death between CNN and Fox News in terms of linguistic features of text?(2)What are the differences in the reports on George Floyd’s death between CNN and Fox News in terms of intertextuality(news source and reporting mode)?(3)What factors lead to the differences in the reports on George Floyd’s death between CNN and Fox News?Through the research,it is found that there exist considerable differences in the way of reporting,despite some commonness between them,which are mainly manifested by their ways of the image construction on the main participants.As for the similarities,both of them have admitted that they are in support of the police’s and the government’s suppression of the protests,expressing a negative and opposed attitude to the protesters.However,in spite of the same critical view on the protests,there are still remarkable differences in the way of reporting.In the description level,they are different from each other in the choice of lexicon and transitivity.In the interpretation level,the two medias mostly retell the quotations in direct speech and adopt plenty of specified sources.Whereas,CNN accepts various forms and many direct speeches to cite the unequal suffering of the protesters.On the contrary,Fox News merely selects government authorities and administrators to make a statement,this indicating the limited reporting scope and reflecting the prejudices of Fox News to the protesters.And in the explanation level,these discourses are placed in the social and cultural context to examine the influence of institutional and societal factors on the different reports of the two medias in order that it can reveal their ideologies and partisanship of the two newspapers.Therefore,the research significance of the thesis lies in revealing the non-objectivity of the reports and the hidden ideology as well as partisanship behind them.The thesis hopes to help the readers develop critical thinking and have a better understanding of the real purpose behind the news discourse,further consolidating the status of CDA in news discourse analysis.