Critical Discourse On Financial News Discourse

The subprime mortgage crisis which broke in 2008,like a tornado,swept all around the world causing a mess in key financial sectors and bankruptcy of some of the biggest investment banks and even traditional industry had no escape to its fatal damage.It certainly had a great and significant impact on the whole civilized world. People finally realized that the trouble in U.S.is no longer its own.The collateral damage it causes has spread to every comer of the world.Every nation shall make effort to the solution of this crisis.The subprime crisis,which now we put as the world-wide financial storm has not only shaken the foundation of the U.S.-lead world economy system but the very core value of the western "credit culture".All eyes are fixed on this issue and millions of reports are found on publications from every country.But after reading and studying many reports from some most noted newspapers(the Times,International Herald Tribune,the Wall Street Journal,and Financial Times)and by digging up between the lines,the author find that their views on a same event are not quite the same,especially on the 700 billion dollars bailout plan by Bush administration to stabilize the market.In this thesis,a two-stage research is conducted:The first stage is quantitative research.The author will randomly choose some titles of the news reports from the newspapers mentioned above and by comparing them,he will reach his conclusion that they are apparently holding different opinions on the same event and the reason lies in their intention to control the readers.At the second stage,the author will each pick up one typical report from the Times and International Herald Tribune(as they are more commonly read than the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times which are professional financial newspapers) and make a further detailed analysis on the two reports to support his conclusion.The author will base his research mainly on a variety of operational strategies from noted experts on CDA such as Van Dijk, Fairclough and Wodak,etc.along with his own knowledge on economics and finance. Through a detailed study,the author will reveal news discourse makers' intention to control the readers and their tricks to construe their own version of texts.And the author's true intention is to improve the readers' rational and critical reading skills and to free them from the manacle of the manipulated information.As the paper involves many terms in economics,though the author has provided some explanation in the Appendix,the trans-disciplinary study also becomes a difficulty in the writing and there might be some potential shortcomings.