| Born in the latter half of last century, Critical Discourse Analysis or Critical Linguistics is anewly developed field in linguistic studies. It seeks out to uncover the relationship betweenlanguage, ideology and power in social settings, by claiming that both ideological loadings as wellas the particular arrangements of certain linguistic forms are systemically inter-related. AsDiscourse is usually constructed in a complicated way, it is difficult to understand how language isframed, and how ideology is constructed in certain discourses. Thus, Critical Discourse Analysisshould be applied as an ideal tool to understand the formations of discourse and its underlyingideology as its nature suggests.Critical Discourse Analysis offers researching on news reports, political papers, officialdocuments, government regulations, legal files, and the like. It could demonstrate how a particularideology of a certain social group is presented in a certain discourse, and how a discourseinfluences other social classes. What is more, it could even reveal for what reasons socialinequalities exist.There are three key factors in Critical Discourse Analysis: Language is considered as the mainmechanism, through which social process constructs itself; Power is treated as the controllingrelationship between social constitution and social members ; Ideology refers to the way in whichwe interact with each other in speaking and thinking under social frameworks.The common approaches applied in Critical Discourse Analysis are: Systemic - FunctionalGrammar, Inter - Textual Analysis, and Historical Analysis, to name just a few.As society develops, news report has pervaded into every aspect of people's daily life, newsreports influence the system of people's knowledge, belief, value, relationships, and identities insocieties and so on. As most English speaking countries are founded on Capitalism - an unequalsocial system, in which inequality and unfairness exist. In this respect, Critical Discourse Analysis,as it nature suggests could uncover what is behind news report in these English speaking countries,and help readers to enhance their critical ability in comprehension.In this study, 11 news samples have been taken from different countries and regions, amongthem, 5 samples are selected from US news media: The New York Times, CNN News, The WallStreet Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Heritage Foundation. These five news channels represent strong preferences and enjoy massive popularity in US, in regard to people'sdaily life, culture, economy, religions, and politics respectively. Another 5 samples are selectedfrom New Zealand Herald, UK's Guardian, Canada's CBC News, Ireland's RTE News, andAustralia's ABC Network News. In addition, 1 news sample has been selected from UN's NewsCenter.We have restricted the issue of reports on global climate change - a world wide phenomenon,exerting overwhelming influences in different parts of the world. News topic is focused onPresident Bush's Rejection from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, a significant issue in internationalaffairs. We have analyzed different coverage on the same news story, to examine different attitudesthese news reports held. We have also worked out what differences and similarities in terms ofideology were distributed in these news reports took, and provided the reasons for them.In terms of theoretical frameworks, Three Dimension Model, proposed by Norman Faircloughhas been applied as the macro- framework in this study, together with Systemic– FunctionalGrammar, proposed by M.A.K. Halliday being applied as the analytical tool, the micro-frameworkin this study. News samples have been classified into different news group, according to theirpublishing places, and have been studied accordingly, with special interests maintained at theexaminations on News Headline, Lexical Choice and Transitivity Analysis.By analyzing, we have drawn the major findings as follows: One the one hand, news reportalthough it has been claimed as a fact with no bias or personal preference, is not as objective as it issupposed to be, rather it is always a representation for the controlling class for the interest of theleaders. There are differences we have found from the news samples, which are the representationsof the ideologies of different countries. On the other hand, journalists might purposely cover thesedifferences in their reports to hide their real ideologies or intentions, so readers as well as teachersand researchers in English must keep alerted to these hidden ideologies. |
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