A Dialogical Analysis Of Reported Speeches From News Discourses On American Presidential Election

We are living in an era flooded with communication and dialogue.Besides the necessary dialogue in daily life,media is conveying information and communicating with us in various forms.Bakhtin(1984) considers that the dialogic nature is the unique phenomenon of language and language only lives in dialogic interaction.In reality,any utterance,in addition to its own theme,always responds(in the broad sense of the word) in one form or another to others' utterance that precedes it.Bakhtin's dialogic theory provides us a possibility to look into news discourses from the critical perspective.It's believed that news must be or be based on facts;otherwise,the news has a weak foundation.This feature differentiates news from literature works,and is in accordance with its primary function-to provide people with information.That is,people tend to believe that news provides an accurate and represetative portrait of reality.Factually,news is not a natural phenomenon emerging straight from "reality",but a product,a product shaped by power and social ideology.The exercise of power,in modern society,is increasingly achieved through ideology,and more particularly through the ideological workings of language.News belongs to the typical ideological workings of language.From a broader perspective,news reflects the prevailing values of a society in a particular historical context.As we know,a necessary component of news is reported speeches.Frequently, reported speeches addressed by different individuals or institutions appear in the same news context to confirm the objectivity and unbiased attitude of the news.That is, multi-voices or different voices can't exist in the same context side by side without dialogic interaction,regardless of whether they confirm,mutually supplement,or conversely contradict one another.Through the investigation into these different reported speeches,readers can hear different voices and realize that language is a constant reflection of class,institutional,national and group interests rather than a neutral demonstration of daily events.As for whose voice is more predominant,it depends on various social factors, such as the prevailing ideology and for which party the newspaper stands.As for how to protrude a particular voice and influence readers unconsciously,it probably depends on the manipulated application of four components of speech reporting,namely news source, reporting verb,reporting mode and content of reported speech.My thesis aims to reveal the covert relationship among ideology,language and power through looking into the dialogic nature of reported speeches in news discourse.All the samples came from the New York Times and USA Today in July and August in 2008,within which two presidential candidates' discrepancy over the issue of Iraq & Afghanistan evoked media's universal attention,which in turn generated all sorts of reports like editorials,live broadcasting and features revolving around the two rivals' view points.18 pieces of hard news were selected,9 from the New York Times and 9 from USA Today.Through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of reported speeches in these samples,we found that press in the U.S.helped Obama a lot in 2008 Presidential Campaign from two aspects.From the perspective of USA Today,as the youngest mainstream newspaper without obtrusive partisan tendency in the U.S.,it widely adopted positive speeches from Obama & his supporters as well as other authorities to promote the positive image of Obama in public.Though supported by the Republican Party,the New York Times,generally,also showed its favor to Obama,the Democratic candidate,as many other mainstream newspapers did.The only difference lied in that the New York Times did something else to restore the popularity of McCain when the atmosphere went against McCain.In summary,newspapers are guided by the prevailing social values and ideologies in certain historical context.That is why Obama achieved overwhelming success over McCain with the help of Media.Meanwhile,it is inevitably for the mainstream media to speak for the party it stands for.Regardless of the slight effect,power and dominance can be achieved through the news discourse,an ideological workings of language.