News Discourse And Ideology

As a main form of public discourse, news discourse is attracting more and more attention with its own characteristics. This thesis defines news discourse as "reports of political, social or cultural events in the newspaper". Through the review of the earlier studies of the two concepts--"discourse" and "ideology", the thesis analyzes the relationship between discourse and ideology, especially between news discourse and ideology. It points out that, the development of discourse analysis offers different analysis modes of and approaches to the studies of news discourse, one of which is the critical linguistics' examination on the aspects of transitivity system, modality, transformation, classification, etc. In addition, there are Van Dijk's framework of news analysis, Giddens's idea about functions of ideology and Thompson's method of ideological analysis, etc. This thesis provides a concrete analysis method of news discourse, which is based on Halliday's systemic-functional grammar, while using critical linguistics' analysis rules as tools, and referring to Van Dijk et al's approaches to ideology analysis. It tries to analyze the news reports through both the dimension of discourse analysis at a micro-level and the dimension of ideology analysis at a macro-level. In doing so we have gained a keener insight into the relationship between news discourse and ideology —ideologies may in principle show up anywhere in news discourse, and discourses may similarly function to help construct or strengthen the existing ideologies. At the same time, we have had a better understanding of the developing trend of news discourse. It is necessary for readers to learn to read the news reports critically and develop their own critical language awareness, as is pointed out in chapter six of this thesis.