A Contrastive Study Of Broadcast News Reports On Xingjiang Riot From Critical Perspective

Critical discourse analysis (CDA), first proposed by Fowler in 1979 in the book Language and Control, not only analyzes discourse on language level, but concerns discourse as a kind of social practice, aiming to display the relationship between language and society through analysis, especially the relationship between language and ideology. News reports are often used as the text sources of CDA. Through analysis this paper tentatively uncovers the hidden ideology behind.This paper firstly proposes a CDA framework which combines Fairclough's three-dimensional model with Halliday's metafunction theory, and makes an analysis of selected news discourses from China Radio International (CRI) and Voice of America (VOA), which are about looting events occurred in Xinjiang on July 5,2009. It analyzes news reports respectively from the perspectives of ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function such as lexical choice, transitivity, modality, thematic choice and the modes of speech reporting. The results show that reports from CRI and VOA are basically objective and fair, but their respective national standpoints are difficult to cover. Serving for the government undeniably, CRI mainly reports the process of events and the follow-up conductions whereas VOA reports the events from the angle of Chinese government and the East Turkestan terrorists respectively. The true viewpoint held by VOA hides under the seemingly fair representation. So the existing inequality and the different culture background largely influence two radio media how to report the incident involving the interests of both countries. Thus, the news reports are actually influenced by the hidden ideology inevitably, and are subject to the social-cultural background.CDA has been frequently applied to analyzing news reports. It has been proved repeatedly that news is not value-free. News can help reproduce ideology besides reflecting ideology. The result of the study has some enlightenment on realistic foreign language teaching. In language class, the teachers should do some teaching on the theory of CDA under possible conditions, in order to improve learners' critical consciousness, to know how discourse builds the reader's point of view.