Attitudinal Analysis Of News Reports On The Same Political Issue

News reports tend to be viewed as objective and unbiased by the public; however, absolutely impersonal news reports never exist due to considerations of ideology and group interests. They reflect, more or less, the reporter's attitude and stance which can help understand the news report profoundly.Previous studies have testified the superiority of the Appraisal Theory in analyzing the interpersonal meaning in a discourse to other approaches. Therefore, this thesis focuses on the study of evaluative resources in the light of the Appraisal Theory, attempting to investigate how evaluation is linguistically realized in the news reports and thus dig out different attitudes implied in the seemingly objective news reports from different countries on the same political issue.By adopting both a qualitative approach and quantitative approach, with the former playing a dominating role in the present study and the latter as a necessary supplementation, this thesis analyzes the evaluative resources in the four news reports issued by the four corresponding mainstream mass media in America and Britain on the political issue of Israeli Invasion of Gaza. Based on the theoretical framework of Appraisal Theory, the thesis carries out the study in terms of its three subcategories covering Attitude, Engagement and Graduation to find out the distribution of evaluative resources and their occurrence frequencies in the four news reports. Therefore, we can explore the evaluative devices applied by the reporters to show their attitudes. The research yields the following major findings:1) Under Attitude subsystem, there are no affective resources, while the judgmental expressions account for the largest proportion and appreciative resources lie in between, which may lead to the conclusion that in the seemingly objective news reports, judgmental appraisal resources are more frequently employed by reporters to indirectly present their stance, compared with affective meanings that tend always to be avoided by reporters for the sake of seeming objectivity. 2) Within Engagement system, heteroglossia is mainly realized through Projection, Modality and Concession to help the reporters shrink responsibilities and avoid being too absolute and subjective, especially Projection which spreads through the whole discourse of the four news reports. Thus, we arrive at the conclusion that reporters prefer to express their own attitudes through the mouth of others for the sake of shunning responsibility.3) Appraisal can be realized through a wide range of linguistic resources in political news reports, such as evaluative lexis, attitudinal epithets, etc.This study indicates a diversified realization of interpersonal meaning in the political news reports. As an instance of discourse analysis relying on the Appraisal Theory, this study witnesses the application of the theory in this particular type of genre and concludes some distinguishing features of evaluation unique to this genre, which may contribute to the elaboration of the Appraisal Theory. In addition, by analyzing the diverse linguistic appraisal resources employed by reporters in news reports, this thesis may help the public better understand a news report, including its degree of objectivity as well as its hidden attitudes or stance.