Media Orientation In Cognitive Perspective

News report is the communication of information on current news which is presented by print, broadcast, or internet to a third party or mass audience. In this sense, news report is generally believed to be based on facts, and many people tend to believe that news can provide accurate and objective account of truth.Actually, news is not a natural phenomenon emerging directly from"reality",but a product shaped by power and social ideology.The exercise of power in modern society, is increasingly achieved through ideology, and more particularly through the ideological workings of language.News belongs to the typical ideological workings of language.From a broader perspective,news reflects the prevailing values of a society in a particularly historical context.As we know, news reporters are trying to reveal the truth by retailing the words of different people and institution. But they are influenced by ideology unconsciously while reporting the news, and the events reported unavoidably tends to reflect the value orientation of a specific group. As for how to protrude a particular voice and influence readers unconsciously, the respective event frames are naturally needed. Frames are specific unified frameworks of knowledge, or coherent schematization of experience, and are presupposed knowledge encoded in words by cognitive structures. The media uses different expression strategies to salience different perspectives of event.This thesis aims to reveal the relationship among media, government, and the public during the Obama's presidential election based on the frame theory. All the samples are selected from the mainstream media of America, Britain, China, and the Middle East from July to December in 2008. 110 pieces of hard news were selected. Through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of these samples, we found that the media used different types of reporting in different time sequences, and the report type of media analysis used widely. By applied frame theory to analysis the reports of candidates, we revealed the reason of Obama's popularity. In sum, newspapers are guided by the prevailing social values and ideologies in certain historical context. Meanwhile, it is inevitable for the mainstream media to speak for the party it stands for. Regardless of the slight effect, power and dominance can be achieved through the news reports, and ideological working of language.