Research On The Frame Of German Media’s Discourse Construction In News Concerning China-related On COVID-19

In early 2020,an outbreak of COVID-19 attracted global attention.COVID-19 was quickly defined by WHO as a public health emergency.The earliest action of China,specific anti-epedemic measures of China,and international aid have also aroused controversial voices in the international community.In this context,Germany,as a country has established diplomatic relations with China for 49 years,the number of domestic news about China are increasing with the expanding of coronavirus.This study is about how the discourse picture about China are drawn through the German media frame,and the reasons behind it.This paper will take five German Mainstream media(Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung、Spiegel Online、Die Zeit、Das Bild、Deutsche Welle)as research samples,using three-level structural theory of Zang Guo Ren as the guide,the specific research core is divided into the following three aspects: for the high-level structure,it analyzes the attention cycle,quantity,genre,theme and orientation of news;for the middle level structure,it makes statistical analysis from six structural links: main events,background,influence and evaluation,etc.;the analysis in low-level structure,combined with Halliday’s systematic functional linguistics,is to deconstruct analysis source and choice mechanism of words,discourse and modality from micro discourse.Through quantitative statistics and qualitative analysis,this study found that German China anti-epdemic news have three main reporting frames: "political bias" media frame,"aggresive diplomacy" discourse frame,"economic consequence" media narrative.The key of high-level structure is to build a macro frame through the selection of basic elements such as theme,perspective and entry point,the frame of the middle level structure is mainly consist of "major events,impacts and assessment","major events and impacts","major events,factors and background" etc.,the low-level structure generally makes the sentence expression serve the ideology and value orientation behind it by choosing Western authoritative source,biased or purposeful vocabulary,using transitivity system and modality with different intensity of mood.The reasons why three news frames were formed are the mold of Eurocentrism,Sino-German relations and interest orientation.