A Critical Analysis Of The Ideological Bias In Chinese And American News Media

Language, which functions as a means of communication, develops side by side with human society and is closely related to individual and social needs. So language is social and is not, as traditional linguistics claims, a transparent medium for communication about an objective world, which tends to be well recognized and taken seriously by modern linguists. The basic purpose of the present work is to argue and demonstrate the value of critical linguistics as an analytic method drawn from linguistics; these claims stem from the belief by the British linguist Roger Fowler that"analysis based on the confident use of proper linguistic terms is better equipped for this task than an amateur commentary using only quasi-grammatical terms."Accordingly, this work mainly concentrates on the theory of critical language study by Fowler and other critical linguists, aiming to expose the influence of ideology to text and the counteractive of text to ideology through the superficial form of language from the angle of linguistics, sociology, and psychology, and to reveal how words and discourses originate from social structure and power relationship and in return serve them.In illustrating the above-mentioned idea, this work falls into five chapters: in the first chapter, the author gives an introduction to the rationale underlying the present thesis, the definition of news and news discourses and the features of news discourses. The author also expresses the research value and the outline of the thesis. The second chapter makes a literature review of the present critical linguistics, and introduces the contributions by scholars in and outside China. The third chapter gives the theoretical framework of the thesis, which is mainly based on Halliday's systemic-functional grammar. Chapter four is the most important chapter of the thesis-the analysis of news report on Iran nuclear issue reported by Xinhua and CNN from the text and intertextual level. The last is the conclusion. It reveals that language can be employed by and is situated in different social and cultural groups to represent the same event from their own particular angle. The selection of a particular angle of representation immediately gives a partial view of the world, thus manifests a difference in ideology. The result thus demonstrates that the framework proposed can be used for the contrastive analysis of media discourse.We come to conclusion in Chapter Five that ideology exists in all kinds of texts including literary works; it is concealed behind the language structure of text, exerting its influence in a subtle way. Being accustomed to it, or covered by it, people usually turn a deaf ear to it, spreading, even intensifying it unconsciously. The purpose of critical linguistics is, through the critical analysis of text, to expose the ideology entailed in language structure and its relationship with social structure and power manipulation.