A Critical Discourse Analysis Of The News Reports On The COVID-19 In China In The New York Times(2020)

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global public health emergency that affects economic development and human life around the world.On March 11,2020,the World Health Organization defined Corona Virus Disease 2019 as “COVID-19”.Many countries have taken numerous measures to prevent the spread of the virus,and global economic activities have almost come to a standstill.In this case,the COVID-19 has become one of the major concerns of news media around the world in 2020.Critical discourse analysis is a research direction and method developed in the field of discourse analysis in the 1980 s.It reveals the relationship between language,power and ideology.The research objects are mainly news reports,political speeches and literary works,etc.As the main way of public information dissemination,the nature of news requires that news reports should reflect the facts objectively.However,when writing reports,reporters will intentionally or unintentionally infiltrate their own views and positions into the text.This study adopts Fairclough’s three-dimensional model as the analytical framework on the basis of Halliday’s systemic functional grammar.By combining with the corpus software UAM Corpus Tool,the author uses qualitative and quantitative research methods to conduct critical discourse analysis on 30 news reports of The New York Times(2020)on the COVID-19 in China.This study aims to solve the following three questions:(1)What are the linguistic features of the news reports on the COVID-19 in China in The New York Times in terms of lexical choice,transitivity and modality?(2)What are the intertextual features of the news reports on the COVID-19 in China in The New York Times in terms of news source and reporting mode?(3)What are the social factors that affect the linguistic and intertextual features of the news reports on the COVID-19 in China in The New York Times?The findings are as follows: Firstly,it is found that The New York Times tend to use words with regional features or negative terms to report the COVID-19 in China,describing China as a bureaucratic and opaque country.The analysis of transitivity shows that reporters have shifted the responsibility for the COVID-19 outbreak to China in their news reports by employing different types of process,such as material process,verbal process and relational process.From the perspective of modality,reporters embed their own ideology and opinions in news reports by choosing different value of modal verbs.Secondly,the analysis of news sources shows that reporters use many semi-specific sources to present a negative image of China.In terms of reporting mode,reporters tend to use indirect speech to integrate their own views into news discourse,thus blaming the Chinese government for the epidemic and criticizing and slandering China.Thirdly,linguistic features and intertextual features of news reports in The New York Times on COVID-19 in China are affected by institutional,political and economic contexts.The New York Times is a private enterprise serving the U.S.government,and it surely represents the interests of the United States to a certain extent.Therefore,The New York Times represents the views and positions of the U.S.government when reporting on COVID-19 in China.