Ideological Differences In News Discourse

Ideology in news discourse is a subject which many branches of Journalism and Communication have touched upon but not systematically studied. Based on the analysis of news reports on the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, which were produced by some media outside the mainland of China, this thesis attempts to gain a deeper understanding of this subject. Specifically, this paper aims to explore the phenomena, tactics and reasons for ideological differences in news discourse. Hopefully, this will lead to a better understanding of news discourse, especially of international news discourse.For the first time, this paper argues that ideological differences of news discourse, as a new academic topic, derive from two streams:one is The Sociology of News Production and the other is News Discourse Research, both of which have developed theories and methodological tools for this topic. By combining different methods including content analysis, news discourse analysis and framework (or context) analysis, we will discuss the master narratives or main themes of different texts. Under these master narratives, we furthermore dissect the differences among core themes and details in texts and draw an overall media perspective of the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, which could be entitled "One event, many narratives". As a result, we find that ideological differences in news discourse exist in every layer from framework to core themes and details.Based on the findings above, we review tactics which are employed to shape different news discourse in reports of the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China. According to our analysis, these tactics mainly include timeline, framework, defining "us" and "them", the selection of news sources, topic-constructing as well as linguistic tools such as metaphor, metonymy, and intertextuality.Finally, we turn our focus to "Why". Rather than simply attribute the reasons why news discourse show ideological diversities to the so-called dominant ideology of a society, we point out two possible approaches to solve this question. According to the discourse approach, news discourse is a subjectively constructed phenomenon. The unique structure, style and rhetoric of news discourse could generate ideologically-based texts. In terms of the sociology of news production, ideological differences in news discourse are directly or indirectly influenced by the different ideologies held by journalists, editors, media groups and the whole society.