A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Reports On China's Sichuan Earthquake

Most CDA studies take political news and economic news as texts.Other news genres,such as sports news,entertainment news,disaster news,are rarely examined. The present study chooses disaster news reports as its focus to offer a supplement to the existing CDA studies of media discourse.By analyzing news reports on China's Sichuan earthquake on May 12^th,2008 in the New York Times,the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times,it is intended to reveal how the US media produce reports on China's natural disaster,and how the ideologies of the powerful group are concealed under the news discourse through language use.This research,examining how the US media produce reports on the earthquake,proves that subjectivity exists in seemingly "neutral" disaster news discourse as well,and reveals that the relationships between language and ideology are close.This thesis adopts Fairclough's three-dimensional model as the framework and Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar as analytic tools.According to Fairclough, three stages of CDA are distinguished as:description,interpretation and explanation. At the stage of description,aspects of transitivity,lexical classification, transformation(nominalization,passivisation),modality and intertextuality (represented sources,representing modes and the setting of the secondary discourse) are examined.At the stages of interpretation and explanation,political,historical and cultural factors are looked into for an explanation of the ideology-driven choices of linguistic forms at the description stage.The study finds that the disaster news is not neutral and could also be used as a medium to convey the ideologies of the powerful group.The reports on China's Sichuan earthquake in the New York Times,the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times are far from value-free.It did not simply report the earthquake itself,but connected it with other elements,which intended to shape a negative image of China. The reasons for these negative attitudes are the foreign policies made by the US government and the political,economic and cultural differences between the two countries.Finally,the thesis proposes that when getting to the diverse news discourses, readers should cultivate their critical awareness and learn to employ critical reading.