| English plays an important role in the international politics, economy and culture, which is in one way manifested in the domination of English media in the whole world. English media of various kinds dominate the public opinion in not only English speaking societies but also non-English speaking countries to some degree. English news influences or even controls people's thoughts in daily life.In 2008 China held the Olympic Games for the first time. As a fast-developing socialist country with many political and cultural differences from the West, China held the spotlight during that period of time. In this thesis eighteen news reports have been selected online respectively from three news institutions from the U.S., U.K and China: Cable News Network (CNN), British Broadcast Corporation (BBC) and China Daily. Actually, these sample reports cover the news, ranging from the torch lit in Athens to the torch relay around the world, to the closing ceremony. Among these reports of different media, there are some overlaps in the coverage of certain events; however, it can be easily found that different media report the same event from different perspectives.This thesis outlines the research background and purpose of the study, highlights its significance and then presents several concepts which are often encountered when making critical analysis of news, such as "language", "discourse", "power" and "ideology" as well as "news values". "Critical" analysis does not mean the analysis involves carping but indicates that the study includes careful examination. Critical Discourse Analysis stresses that discourse is shaped by power and control and has also great effect on social identities and ideologies.The thesis also introduces CDA as an analytical tool, Fairclough's three dimensional framework and Halliday's SFG. It can be seen that it is impractical to separate three functions (ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function)of language in discourse analysis and three stages (description stage, interpretation stage and explanation stage) of discourse analysis are all indispensable to complete discourse analysis. Previous critical discourse studies have been carried out mainly on racism, sexism and other social inequalities. The researchers aim at discourses in public from different angles such as transitivity, modality, nominalization, etc.Finally the thesis examines how these three news institutions of different backgrounds report the same event related to the Beijing Olympics. Based on specific language uses, a detailed analysis of speech reporting in the sample news reports is carried out from three perspectives:news source, reporting mode and reporting verbs. The reporters of the three media prefer different catcgorics of news sources while direct speech and indirect speech are preferable and preset direct speech is least used. In addition, China Daily tends to use limited reporting verbs while CNN likes to use different reporting verbs. More importantly, various combinations of news sources, reporting modes and reporting verbs effectively transmit the ideologies hidden in the discourses.When reporting news events, the Western media often operate in the "Us versus Them" framework. Many studies have already been done on analysis of politics-related news. It has been concluded that the ideological factors greatly influence the reporters' use of words and thus affect the readers' judgements. Although the Olympics are claimed to have nothing to do with politics; however, the concern it causes and the influence on the public already go beyond the Games themselves. It is found that the political factors are involved in the reports and words like "democracy", "human rights" and "Tibet" repeatedly make their appearances in the sample news reports.News reports cannot reflect the truth in an absolutely objective and impartial way and the embedded ideology will influence the readers implicitly. After a study of these Olympics-related news reports, this thesis concludes that the three news institutions, through the usage of different language forms, give different representations and interpretations of the same event in accordance with their social and political ideologies. It is hoped that EFL learners such as college students could trace ideological factors in the discourses and identify real differences pertaining not to the fact the writers present but to the ideology they reflect.It should be noted that London Olympics will be held in 2012. The host nation, the UK. is a capitalist country, far away from China. What will happen there may also attract attention of various media and seems irrelevant to China in theory. Possible research on news reports of different media in this aspect will be interesting and rewarding. |
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