Critical Discourse Analysis On The News Reporting Of Disaster

Since 1960s, critical linguistics approach has made some researches on news of various kinds. Similar studies have not been conducted in China until mid-1990s.This thesis is based on the proposition language use via discourse constructs reality. We have collected 19 news reports on Hurricane Katrina from the New York Times and the Washington Post during the period of Aug. 29—Sept. 5, 2005. Two of them are selected for case studies after strict and reasoning comparison and pre-analysis. They represent two considerations after the disaster: racism and inequality still remain in the society and the federal government reacts torpidly towards emergent event.In the light of Teun van Dijk's discourse, cognition, and society triangle model, we have achieved two sample analyses of the news discourses and justify the role of discourse in reproduction of reality. In these two cases, it is particularized in the role of discursive reproduction of racism and inequality in society and the federal government's breach of duty in the disaster.