A Critical Discourse Analysis Of China-related Economic Reports In The New York Times

As a mass medium, news discourse plays a very important role in affecting thepublic’s ideology and mentality. News reports are claimed by the professionalstandards to be objective and impartial, but in reality, they are affected by politics,historical backgrounds，other social and cultural factors. The western media claim thattheir reports are objective and impartial. The claim is true or not, and under their newsdiscourses, are there social and ideological bias and power relations they implicitlyrepresent? This is the question this research tries to answer. Critical DiscourseAnalysis (CDA) is an interdisciplinary study of discourses. It takes the theories fromvarious areas of humanities and social sciences to the analysis of discourses, andprovides effective approaches to analysis of news reports covering all aspects ofhuman social and political life. It is based on linguistic theories with application toareas such as political science, sociology, psychology and mass media studies. CDAreveals the social ideology and power relations and other factors deeply hidden indiscourses by means of analyzing discourses’ characters. This research analyzes theeconomic and business reports and journalistic opinions with the aid of CDA, tryingto find out the implied political and ideological mentality and power relations behindthe journalist discourses of the West, to answer the question of objectivity of westernjournalism, the key of this research. This thesis also aims to cultivate the readingpublic the ability to critically analyze the news reports and understand the hiddenideological attitudes and power relations in the news reports. By this way, the readingpublic can appreciate the news reports more critically and insightfully.This thesis takes the theories of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as thefoundation, takes CDA put forward by Fowler etc.as theoretical framework and takesFairclough’s three—dimensional model to make analysis of economic discourses. Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) emphasizes three metafunctions of language,namely, ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. This thesistakes five discourses about Chinese inflation from The New York Times (NYT)(2010&2011), and makes quantitative analysis and qualitative research on transitivity,classification, nominalization, thematic choice and modality of economic discourses,in order to reveal the ideology and power relations in the discourses about Chineseeconomic reports in NYT.This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter is the introduction. Itproposes the question the thesis tries to answer and the background knowledge of thisresearch. The purpose and significance of this thesis and its outline are given. ChapterTwo reviews theoretical foundations, previous studies on CDA at home and abroad,limitations of previous CDA studies, some CDA researches on media discourses athome and abroad and the three—dimensional model. Chapter three shows researchframework and methodology. It discusses the notion and value of news, ideology inCDA, power relations in CDA as well as data collection this thesis has chosen.Besides, transitivity, classification, nominalization, thematic choice and modality arediscussed. Chapter Four contains the corpus and the procedure of how it is selectedand the preliminary results and explanations of CDA of these materials. Chapter Fiveis a conclusion. It contains the summary of the present study, some proposals to dealwith negative western news reports, the main contributions of the thesis and thelimitations of the thesis and speculation about future research.