A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On China’s Economy In New York Times And Wall Street Journal

This study carries out a critical analysis of the economic news reports about China inAmerican media. It aims to reveal the dialectical relationship between language and ideologythrough language forms.Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) evolved from Critical Linguistics (CL), which wasproposed by Fowler et al. in the late1970s. It an interdisciplinary approach to the study ofdiscourse that views language as a form of social practice and focuses on the ways social andpolitical domination are reproduced in text and talk. To put it simply, CDA aims at revealing theunderlying ideological meaning in all forms of communication. Media discourse, especiallypolitical discourse is one of the non-literary fields which have drawn special attention of criticalanalysts. By contrast, little attention has been paid to economic discourse. However, politicaldiscourse usually conveys relatively explicit ideologies, which are not difficult for the addresseeto identify. Unlike the obvious tendency of political discourse, economic discourse is oftenconsidered to be more objective. Since most of the previous studies of CDA have focused onpolitical discourse, little attention has been paid to economic discourse. This study carries out acritical analysis of economic news selected from American media.The analyzed data are news reports about China’s economy, selected from New York Timesand the Wall Street Journal published in2012. News discourse, especially news reports producedby mainstream media, is the reflection of ideologies of certain interests group to some extent. Asthe mainstream media in the United States, New York Times and Wall Street Journal have greatinfluence among the public and can to a great extent represent the values and ideologies of mostof the media in the United States. Thus the contents of the present study are representative. Thisstudy is carried out within the framework of Fairclough’s three-dimensional model. Based onthis model, the present study will be conducted at three stages: description, interpretation andexplanation. A set of linguistic analytical tools, adopted from Halliday’s Systemic FunctionalLinguistics (SFL), is employed in this study. Theoretically, through the three-level analysis oflanguage use, it hopes to make a supplement to the study of critical discourse analysis in economic news discourse. Practically, it hopes to raise the readers’ critical language awareness inthe process of dealing with the problems emerged from the increasing intervention of languageon social life.This study found that the economic news reports are not absolutely objective and fair asclaimed. In Western capitalist society, news media will inevitably subject to the interests of thevarious political groups and power blocs. They always implicitly convey a variety of ideologicalmeaning which has a subtle influence on readers. Therefore, readers should improve theirappreciation level and critical ability of language use，and strengthen critical language awarenessin daily life.