A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On COVID-19 From Chinese And American Mainstream Media Based On Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Model

The COVID-19 that broke out in December 2019 was defined by the World Health Organization as a global public health crisis.As the country that first publicly reported the virus,China has swiftly adopted efficient prevention and control measures and achieved remarkable results.However,the domestic epidemic situation in the United States has not been effectively controlled.In the past year,news reports of the COVID-19 epidemic in Chinese and American mainstream media have become a focal point of conflict.Therefore,the present study attempts to take a comparative analysis of Chinese and American news reports on the COVID-19,in hope of disclosing the ideologies and power relations hidden behind the news discourse.In view of this,based upon Fairclough’s three-dimensional model,this thesis selects 40 news reports from Chinese and American mainstream media respectively,and builds two corpora,namely,Corpus A and Corpus C.Through a corpus-based quantitative and qualitative methods,the present study conducts critical discourse analysis regarding COVID-19 news reports from the three stages of description,interpretation,and explanation.The major findings are presented as follows:At the stage of description,the present study focuses mainly on three aspects:classification,transitivity and modality.In terms of lexical classification,it is found that Chinese mainstream media are more objective and cautious in naming the COVID-19 and their description on the severity of the virus tends to be relatively euphemistic.The analysis of the transitivity system of clauses found that the options of types of processes and the positioning of participants in the processes enable the media in the two countries to serve different intentions or ideologies.In general,Chinese media strive for the objective presentation of the active image of China which is upholding the concept of “people and life first”,“efficiency and unity” and“sharing and cooperation” in the fight against the epidemic.Conversely,American mainstream media cannot present an objective evaluation of China’s active efforts in the epidemic and tend to report some deficiencies or negative sides of China in news samples.With regard to modality analysis,both Chinese and American newspapers use the largest proportion of median modal verbs in pursuit of fairness and objectivity in news reporting.Nevertheless,newspapers show different attitudes and intentions by using modal verbs in a different way.At the interpretation stage,analysis of news source shows that the majority of utterances are from specific sources,among which the voices of social power owners are most represented.In comparison,China has quoted more utterance from government or officials.As for the analysis of the mode of reporting,it is found that indirect discourses take up the largest proportion,followed by direct discourses and narrative report of speech acts.In general,Chinese mainstream media employ more narrative reports of speech acts than their American counterparts.In comparison,it is discovered that American reporters exert more interference when reporting others’ words and tend to establish a negative image of China.At the explanation stage,it can be summarized that different epidemic situation in the two countries,different values and ideologies held by the mainstream media,and different social and cultural contexts between China and the US are reasons for distinctive features in the two countries.The findings of the study are conducive to readers’ better understanding of the relationship between language and ideology,thereby enhancing their critical awareness when reading news reports.In addition,the present study also provides implications for Chinese media about how to tell China’s story and spread China’s voice in the post-pandemic era.