A Comparative Study Of International Ecological Discourse In News Reports Of COVID-19 Epidemic Between China And American From The Perspective Of Attitude System

The COVID-19 epidemic breaks out at the end of 2019 and quickly attracts the attention of the global media.As a kind of media discourse,news report is an important tool to show the will of a country and to build national image.The attitude,position and ideology conveyed by news deeply influence people’s thinking,behavior and even the environment in which people live.At the same time,it also influences the construction of social ecology.On this basis,what kind of ecological property does the mainstream media of China and America reflect in their news reports on COVID-19 in China need to be studied from different perspectives.Therefore,under the guidance of the international ecological philosophy of “diversity and harmony,interaction and co-existence”,this study compares the news discourses about China’s anti epidemic efforts by mainstream media in China and America from the perspective of attitude systems,to explore the similarities and differences in the news discourse of the two countries and analyze the reasons.The arduous process of China in fighting the COVID-19 has roughly gone through three stages,namely,the outbreak stage of the epidemic in China,the ongoing prevention and control stage of epidemic prevention and control,and the implementation stage of COVID-19 vaccination.The news reports of China and America in different stages express different emotion,attitude and show different ecological properties.Therefore,this study selects China Daily and New York Times as the corpus sources and chooses several relevant news discourses from three different stages of COVID-19 in China,and builds two small corpora according to different keywords.With the help of the software UAM Corpus Tool,the attitude resources and their ecological properties are annotated in detail by manual annotation.Then,based on the statistical results of UAM Corpus Tool,the distribution of the ecological properties of attitude resources in each stage are analyzed.Correspondingly,the changes of the ecological properties of the attitude resources in the two mainstream media among the three different stages are analyzed and some similarities and differences between them are presented.On this basis,the reasons of why China and America have those similarities or differences are given.The study finds that both of the mainstream media take attitude resources as the main way to show their ecological awareness,and presented different ecological property at the different stages of COVID-19 in China.The specific results are as follows: First of all,China’s mainstream media tend to use eco-beneficial attitudinal resources to express their affirmation to China’s action in fighting against the epidemic,showing a positive attitude.American mainstream media tend to use eco-destructive attitudinal resources to deny China’s efforts to actively take action to prevent the epidemic diseases and show a negative attitude.Secondly,both of the mainstream media incline to use judgment resources to show their ecological property.While Chinese mainstream media praise the unity and bravery of Chinese people and express a kind of praise for China’s anti epidemic measures by using a large amount of judgment resources,American mainstream media criticize and even condemn China’s action of not control the epidemic in time by the use of judgment resources.In addition,at different stages of the COVID-19 in China,the number of eco-beneficial attitudinal resources maintains a continuous upward trend in the three stages while the number of eco-ambivalent ones and eco-destructive ones keep a downward trend.However,in American media,the number of eco-destructive and eco-ambivalent attitudinal resources keeps a fluctuating trend and accounts for the highest proportion,while the eco-beneficial attitudinal resources continue to account for the lowest proportion.Finally,in terms of the reasons for the different ecological properties of the two media in different stages of COVID-19 in China,different national interests,complex diplomatic relations,dynamic international ecological environment,and different ecological philosophies influence the ecological properties of news discourse.Therefore,this study not only broadens the research perspective of news reports on the COVID-19,and enriches the comparative research methods of news reports between China and America,but also expands the scope of attitude system in news discourse research.In addition,this paper also helps to appeal domestic and foreign journalists to pay attention to the use of eco-beneficial attitudinal resources,helps readers pay more attention to the ecological awareness in news reports,improves people’s ecological awareness,and encourage people to pursue the sustainable development of human beings and the environment.