A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On China’s Sichuan Earthquake In American Newspapers

With the rapid development of science and technology, there is a growing number of ways to get information. The news media is an important medium and it has become the main way people understand the world. On the one hand, the news can promote the exchange of information. On the other hand, as a means of control, the news media has an important impact in the political, economic and cultural aspects. Disaster news, as one important and seemingly neutral type of news, draws more and more attentions from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) linguists. CDA not only focuses on the structure and meaning of the language, it also concerns the practical application of the discourse. With the in-depth study of the relationship between language and ideology, more and more people start using critical discourse analysis approaches to analyze linguistic features of disaster news discourse.This dissertation selects four reports about Sichuan earthquake from New York Times, New York Post and Newsweekly and uses Fairclough’s Three Dimensional Theory and critical discourse analysis techniques to analyze the news coverage of the different media in the United States, which reveals its inherent ideologies.After in-depth study, the author finds that disaster news reports, like other mass discourse, also hide the ideology. This dissertation will reveal the underlying ideology through analysis of transitivity, lexical classification and transformation in four reports. At the same time, the author finds that U.S media deliberately demonize the image of China. Through this research, the author hopes it can enhance the reader’s critical consciousness during the process of reading, also hopes to do a little supplement to the critical analysis of disaster news reports.