Critical Analysis Of News Discourse

In recent years, media has played a more and more important role in society,which not only provides information but also orient readers with certainideology in both overt and covert ways. And the media research is flourishing.The 'standard position'of current studies of the media is that news is aconstruct which is to be understood in social and semiotic terms; and everyoneacknowledges the importance of language in this process of construction. Butin practice, language gets relatively meager treatment, when it comes toanalysis. In the present study, language is given fundamental importance. Theaim of this paper is to reveal ideological construction of new racism embeddedin newspaper reporting by analyzing its language from both the micro andmacro perspectives.The analysis focuses on news reports relating to the Skinhead gangs in LosAngeles where large groups of Asian immigrants inhabit. The tools used in thepaper is Critical Discourse Analysis, which simply means an enquiry into therelations between signs, meanings and the social and historical conditionswhich govern the semiotic structure of discourse, using a particular kind oflinguistic analysis. This particular kind of linguistic analysis is based onHalliday's Systematic Functional Grammar, which along with the socialcognitive branch of CDA established by Van Dijk are introduced before theactual analysis. The analysis is divided into two stages: first, a generalcharacterization of the newspaper discourse from the aspects of headline andlead, generalization, quotation patterns and over-lexicalization, revealingevidence of a systematic 'othering'and stereotyping of the ethnic communityby the 'white'majority. This is followed by a comparative analysis of tworeports in terms of transitivity and thematization, which provides evidence of a...