A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On Immigration In New York Times

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) has been drawing more and more linguists’ attention since its birth in the late1970s. As a method of text analysis, it aims to explore the hidden ideology through analyzing the linguistic features and social background of the discourse, and further reveal the relationship between language, power and ideology. With the fast development of modern information network and communication technology, mass media are playing a more and more important role in people’s social life. As an important carrier of information transmission, news discourses not only serve as the source of information, of enrichment and entertainment of people’s cultural life, but also does it express obscurely all kinds of ideologies, thus changes people’s values subtly. So far critical linguists mainly focus on the research on news discourses.The United States is one of the biggest immigration countries in the world. Immigrants have being made great contribution to America’s economic, social and cultural improvement and prosperity. Generally speaking, American welcome immigrants in the history of immigration, but the opposing voices have been prevalent.Based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Halliday’s theory of systemic-functional grammar, this thesis analyzes news reports from New York Times and tries to find the similar linguistic features in the samples. Associated with the development of America’s immigration, it eventually clarifies the ideologies hidden in news discourse. Samples in this thesis are nine English news reports on immigration since Barack Hussein Obama took office. The present analysis is conducted at three stages. At the descriptive stage, linguistic features about samples are investigated from three metafunctional levels of language:lexical choice and transitivity in ideational function; modality in interpersonal function and thematic choice in textual function. At interpretive stage, modes of discourse representation are examined. At explanative stage, the explanation of the news reports is supplied by the relevant social and cultural context of the United States and social-historical context concerning on immigration. The analysis shows that the attitudes of media towards immigration are complex and contradictory:on the one hand, it seems imperative to implement immigration reform because of Obama’s commitment to voters. And it reaches consensus in this point among most American media. On the other hand, they express great divergence on how to carry out immigration reform. They are worried about the corrosive effect on many aspects of American society. The status of "illegal immigrants" and bad effects it took are overemphasized by most media. However, the contributions immigrants made are neglected. The research findings indicate that the economic interest and discrimination to immigrants are responsible for the contradictory attitudes.The thesis aims to reveal the ideology hidden in news discourse through a critical discourse analysis of news reports on immigration from New York Times. It also indicates that it is in accordance with America’s economic and political interests. The thesis is helpful to raise readers’awareness of hidden ideology rather than accept the text information unconsciously and passively, and only in this way the reader can understand the real intention behind the news reports.