A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Chinese And American News Reports On2010Yushu Earthquake

News reports, as one of the mass medium, are influencing people’s judgments and cognitions for the events imperceptibly. Therefore, a research on news reports and ideologies hidden behind them is necessary.From the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this paper combined Fairclough’s three-dimensional model with Halliday’s Functional Grammar as the analytical framework, and carried out a comparative analysis of news reports concerned with2010Yushu earthquake of China from China Daily and The New York Times. This paper took4news reports from The New York Times and8news reports from China Daily as samples and analyzed the data from three aspects, namely, text, discourse practice and social practice. At the level of text, the research analyzed the data from the aspects of transitivity and modality; at the level of discourse practice, the paper made a comparative analysis of the two newspapers from the aspects of news sources and reporting modes; at the level of social practice, the study combined certain political, historical and cultural backgrounds to explain the choices of text level and discourse practice level and different ideologies reflected by the different choices.The research shows that in the aspects of linguistic strategies and discourse practices, the two newspapers have differences in reporting2010Yushu earthquake. The reason for the difference is the different ideologies of the two newspapers, and the different ideologies represent different standpoints of Chinese and American governments. Meanwhile, the two newspapers both are trying to influence readers’ judgments and standpoints for a certain event according to different ideologies hidden behind the news reports. In addition, different sociolcultural backgrounds of the two countries and the ever-changing Sino-U.S. relationship also influence the news discourse constructions.The research could help to raise readers’critical language awareness and provide them a critical reading method on how to find and interpret ideologies hidden behind news discourse.