A Comparative Study On Reporting Speeches In Disaster News Reports Of China Daily And New York Times

With an analytical framework consisting of mode of reporting speech, news source and reporting verbs, which is developed out of Geis's model of news reporting speeches and Bell's theory of reporting verbs,15 news reports from China Daily (CD) and 15 from New York Times (NYT) as its data, the present study has been conducted as a comparative study of reporting speeches in the news reports on 2010 Yushu earthquake from CD and NYT with both quantitative and qualitative research methods.The research questions of the study are 1) what are the similarities and differences in reporting speeches between China Daily and The New York Times concerning the reports on Yushu earthquake of 2010? 2) What are the possibly reasons for the differences on reporting speech between the two news papers?The major findings of the study include 1) In terms of reporting mode, NYT applies more indirect speeches (IS) than direct speeches (DS), while for CD, DS and IS are used at similar percentages; On the whole, NYT has more IS than CD but less DS than CD. Both CD and NYT adopt DS only when coming to the reports concerning Tibetan monks, but when it comes to Dalai Lama, CD has employed only one DS out of 5 reporting speeches while NYT has employed 19 DS out of 20 reporting speeches. (2) For news source, CD offers more explicit news source than NYT except the case with Dalai Lama reports; officials and governmental institutions are the primary sources of news for both CD and NYT, taking up a big proportion in all the news sources. (3) For affective reporting verbs, CD has applied more positive verbs than NYT in the reports on Yushu earthquake, but both CD and NYT have used very few negative verbs. Neutral verbs, with "say" as the most used one, take up the biggest part in the reports from both CD and NYT. For volatility verbs, CD and NYT show no much difference, with both taking a preference for low volatility verbs but avoiding high volatility verbs.The paper then offers interpretations of the similarities and differences found in this study before suggesting its implications, applications and further studies.