| After the end of the Cold War,inferences such as "The End of Ideology" and "The End of History" were rampant in the western academia.However,ushering into the 21st century,the world situation is turbulent,the western democratic system has been questioned unprecedentedly,the liberal value system that has long dominated the western world has been greatly impacted,the global ideological landscape is undergoing great vicissitude,and the world is facing profound changes unseen in a century.American mainstream media usually deny their ideological attributes.However,the reality of political polarization,widening gap between the rich and the poor,and intensifying social contradictions in recent American society once again confirms the long-standing ideological confrontation that has been persistently existed in the United States,namely the debate and gaming between liberalism and conservatism.Reviewing the history of American minds,liberalism has always been the mainstream ideology of American society.But today,conservatism has had a profound impact on American politics and diplomacy,and turned into an important theoretical paradigm for interpretation of American political polarization and social confrontations.In the process of shaping and guiding the mainstream ideology,media play a pivotal role.The editorial section of The Wall Street Journal is famous for its conservative stance,exerting guidance and influence on American public opinions.In order to study and analyze the ideological characteristics of American mainstream media,this study adopts a macro-to-micro research strategy and a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods under the methodological framework of"deep hermeneutics" proposed by John·B·Thompson to comprehensively review the agenda-setting system,narrative framework,ideological characteristics and overall narrative strategy of the post-Cold War editorials in the Wall Street Journal.At the macro level,social-historical analysis is adopted to analyze the historical background and social context of the post-Cold War editorials in the Wall Street Journal.At the meso level,methods of automatic content analysis and semantic network analysis based on big data algorithm are used to investigate the agenda-setting system and narrative framework of the post-Cold War editorials in the Wall Street Journal.At the micro level,focusing on the analysis of narrative framework and ideological characteristics,textual analysis is used to conduct in-depth hermeneutic interpretation of ideologies in the post-Cold War editorials of the Wall Street Journal.From the perspective of agenda-setting system,there are three characteristics embodied in the post-Cold War editorials in the Wall Street Journal,which include comprehensiveness,politicization and localization.In terms of narrative framework,conservatism in the Wall Street Journal was jointly constructed through four major frameworks,namely,the neoconservative framework under the international relation issues,the moderate conservative framework under the political and legal issues,the neoliberal framework under the economic and trade issues,and the socio-cultural conservative framework under the social issues.In terms of ideological characteristics,the editorials adhere to neo-conservatism in international politics and moderate conservatism in domestic politics,presenting an ideological pattern of being radical externally and being conservative internally.On international relation issues,a logic circulation has been formed in the editorials’neo-conservative ideology,wherein the emphasis has been shifted from "equal stress of anti-terrorism and anti-communism" to "anti-terrorism before anti-communism" then back to "anti-communism before anti-terrorism",evolving the "Cold War mentality" to"New Cold War mentality".In domestic politics,the editorials take a pro-Republican narrative frame and act as a de facto addressor of the Republican Party.On economic and trade issues,the editorials advocate low taxation,small government,liberalization,privatization,marketization and globalization,adhering to the neoliberal economic thought.In terms of social issues,the editorials generally cling to the ideological characteristics of social-cultural conservatism,which puts freedom before equality,equality of opportunity before equality of results,and upholding virtue and traditional values,reflecting the characteristic of a realist turn from value distribution to benefit and resource distribution.In terms of narrative strategy,the editorials became the prolocutor of conservatism as an open narrator,completed the strategic construction of its ideological stance through flexible alternation of multiple narrative perspectives,implicated the profound truth in the subtle language by adopting a unique narrative style,laying a solid foundation for the Wall Street Journal to win the discourse power and recognition.From the perspective of communication studies,this study conducted a long-term and comprehensive investigation of the post-Cold War editorials in the Wall Street Journal with quantitative path under the automatic content analysis method based on big data algorithm and analyzed the ideological features and narrative strategies of the American mainstream media with qualitative path through in-depth interpretation of the text,further enriching the academic understanding and research on the conservative American media and carrying out an innovative exploration of analyzing ideologies in American mainstream media. |
