CDA And News Discourse

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a widely used paradigm for discourseanalysis by linguists from the West. It aims to reveal hidden ideology and powerrelations implanted in discourse by analyzing texts, discourse practice that producesdiscourse and social context in which discourse is produced and disseminates. As a typeof very influential public discourse, journalistic coverage has been studied byresearchers from both linguistics and journalism areas. Therefore, an integrated andcross-disciplinary methodology for analyzing news discourse critically is worthdiscussing. In this study, the author first gives9discourse strategies that are often usedby reporters to deliver bias through their articles. These strategies are appraisal, wordschoices, classification, generalization, nominalization, passivization, tense, newsresources analysis and news structure analysis. For discourse practice analysis, theauthor discusses several other applicable methods which include the historicalbackground of news events, news type, and identity of reporters, etc. To analyze socialcontext, researchers could examine the media from its economic conditions, politicalstandpoint and the socio-cultural surrounding in which a newspaper is operated andcirculates.The study examines New York Times’ coverage on ‘The death of bin laden’employing those methods discussed before. Four articles published on the newspaperbetween the dates from May2,2011to May6,2011are chosen for text analysis. Textsanalysis has showed that the coverage contained some bias. Discourse practice analysisand social contexts analysis then explained what led to the bias. That can be attributedto several reasons, such as dependency on official news resources, the complexity of thenews event, pressure of the social mainstream ideology and so on.