| Newspapers and magazines are main media for people to know the world.However, what they present us is not an objective but a processed world. Drivenby various interests and ideologies, the reporters are inclined to modify andstrategize the facts. As a result, this paper takes the reports about Beijing big stormin NewYork Times and China Daily as samples to analyze how American andChinese media reported the event and how ideologies of the authorities are hiddenin the news texts through language.Fairclough s three-dimensional model and Halliday s systemic-functionallinguistics are applied as analytical tools in this paper. Qualitative and quantitativemethods are employed in a comparative way to study the reports. As for theformer, the syntactic features of American and Chinese reports are studied throughanalyzing the aspects of transitivity, lexical choice, transformation and modality.As for the latter, through statistics, that to what extent objectivity andmanipulation are involved in the news sources (interviewees) and modes of speechreporting (direct or indirect) is exposed. It is showed that the report features of thetwo media are different under different political circumstances.It is concluded that all news reports are not objective and unbiased. NewYorkTimes and China Daily adopted different angles to report this event anddeliberately chose the facts which are useful for them to express their standpoints.In general, China Daily attaches more importance to the happenings of the stormand the measures taken to fight against it，whereas, NewYork Times pays moreattention to the hidden reasons for the disaster and the effect caused by it so as todivert the public attention to the responsibility of the government. |
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