A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On 2008 Tibet Unrest In New York Times

As a relatively new linguistic theory, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) seeks to uncover the social relationship and ideology embedded in public discourse. Its dedication to revealing power and ideology behind discourse exactly complies with the purpose of this study—to explore the real attitude of New York Times to China and explore the ideological and sociocultural source behind the attitude.In 2008, Tibet unrest not only seriously disrupted social stability and local people's lives, but also triggered people's doubt on the objectivity of Western media. The thesis analyzes six sample news reports in New York Times under Fairclough's three-dimensional framework by adopting Halliday's systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) as the analytic tool. Qualitative analysis is carried out in three stages, i.e., description, interpretation,and explanation. Description stage focuses on the analysis of language features, including lexical choice, transitivity, and modality. In the stage of interpretation, the intertextuality is explored via investigating the modes of speech. In explanation, the source ideology leading to the discourse practice is investigated. The three stages establish a comprehensive image of the discourse event.The analysis results demonstrate that New York Times indeed adopts a negative attitude to the Chinese government and the reporters implant their bias and negative emotions into the reports subtly by employing various linguistic tools. The thesis proves that the news reports, known for objectivity and impartiality, are affected by social and cultural context.The thesis is not to criticize the bias of New York Times against China on the Tibet unrest, but to make the formation of news reports more transparent through CDA. Thus, the value of this research lies in its positive effect in improving readers'critical awareness and independent judgment of news reports. The thesis also would like to remind Western media to jump out of the inherent ideological and sociocultural frameworks to achieve maximum objectivity when reporting the events of other countries.