| With the development of scientific technologies, there are a variety of methods available for people to know the outside world. Listening to news broadcast, reading newspapers and looking through news on websites has already become an indispensable part of people's daily life. As a kind of public discourse, news discourse reflects society and culture. New reports are required to be objective and impartial. However, there is always reporters'attitudes and power tendency hidden in the reports, especially ideology of the government they represent. If readers do not have awareness of critical reading, they would be easily influenced by the hidden ideology. Therefore, in order to grasp the reporters'purpose and hidden ideologies, it is necessary to analyze news reports from the perspective of critical discourse analysis.The concept of critical linguistics, which was first put forward by Fowler and his colleagues in Language and Control in 1979, marked the beginning of critical discourse analysis. Critical discourse analysis, a multi-dimensional and multi-disciplinary discourse-analytic approach, advocates to incorporate social-political insights into discourse analysis. Assuming a critical stance, CDA intends to explore relations of ideology, power and social inequity in language.Conformed to the three procedures of critical discourse analysis put forward by Fairclough, namely, description, interpretation and explanation, the present thesis adopts a qualitative and quantitative method to analyze new reports collected from American newspapers, which centered on "2009 UN Climate Change Conference" held in Copenhagen, Denmark from 7th to 18th December. Halliday's systemic-functional grammar, together with Fairclough's three-dimensional framework, constitutes the theoretical framework of the current study. The current study is conducted at three levels: at the textual level, lexical classification and transitivity are employed as analytic tools to explore the linguistic features of the sample texts; at the discursive level, the transformation of news reports is discussed from the perspective of intertextuality, including news source and modes of news reporting; at the socio-practice level, combined with the socio-cultural background in which news events happened, linguistic features and textual choices are explained so as to uncover the hidden ideology. According to data analysis from textual level, discursive level and socio-practice level, it arrives at the conclusion that news reports are not just and objective as it claims to be. When reporting news on climate change, American newspapers incorporate ideologies from environmental to economic, even political aspect into the discourse.The primary purpose of the present research is to make some contributions to critical analysis of news discourse. The significance lists as follows:Firstly, it confirms that there are political tendency and ideology hidden in news reports, not only limited to discourse of politics, racism and gender discrimination, but also extended to other fields such as climate change. Therefore, it can be convincingly stated that ideologies exist everywhere. Secondly, the thesis uncovers how language contributes to the domination of people by the upper class, and thus helps to promote the readers'capacity of critical reading and critical awareness so that they would not be easily affected by the news reports. The last but a practical one, it is expected to give some enlightenment on foreign language teaching and learning so that English learners may have a better understanding of English texts, new reports in particular. |
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