| Critical discourse analysis, a recent school of discourse analysis, concerns itself with ideology, relations of power and inequality in language. A multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary approach to discourse analysis is at the heart of CDA, which intends to incorporate social-theoretical and social-political insights into discourse analysis and advocates social commitment in research.The primary objective of the current study is to make some contributions to the contemporary theory of critical discourse analysis in the field of news reporting. Aiming at this primary objective, this thesis attempts to answer the following two questions: (1) What linguistic devices are employed by American newspapers to present news relevant to climate change, to be specific, about 2007 UN Climate Change Conference? (2) What ideologies are embedded in American news discourses, concerning the issue of climate change?To answer the above questions, we have conducted a quantitative and qualitative analysis of data collected from American news reports on "2007 UN Climate Change Conference" held in Bali Indonesia from the 3rd to 14th December 2007. Fairclough's three-dimensional model, together with Halliday's systemic-functional grammar, constructs the theoretical framework of the current research. It arrives at the conclusion that concerning the issue of climate change, American newspapers carry hidden ideologies from the environmental, economic and political perspectives. The representation and transformation of events in the process of news production is ideologically tinted. |
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