A Critical Discourse Analysis Of CNN’s Reports On China’s Political Emergencies

The discourse strategies of political news in CNN on China’s political emergencies is examined from the perspective of critical discourse analysis(CDA). This study reveals the ideology embedded in CNN’s reports on Tiananmen terrorist attack, and the social and cultural context which contributes to the ideology.Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of CDA is employed and Halliday’s systematic-functional grammar is incorporated in analysis. Fairclough(1989) identified three stages of critical discourse analysis; description of the text, interpretation of the relationship between text and interaction, and explanation of the relationship between interaction and social context. Through above three stages’ analysis, this thesis attempt to explain the relationship among language, power and ideology. So this thesis studies three research questions in order to explain their relationships: 1、What are the linguistic features in CNN’s news reports on Tiananmen Terrorist Attack? 2、What ideology is imparted by CNN’s news reports on Tiananmen Terrorist Attack? 3、Under what circumstances are the ideologies imparted by CNN formed?All the data is collected from CNN. And the data contains seven articles which are published since October 28, 2013, the day the Tiananmen Terrorist Attack happened. All of the articles are between 310-1000 words, and are still available online. Based on these data, this study analyzes from three aspects that is text, discourse and social context. In the textual analysis, investigation on transitivity, modality, and classification has been conducted, which is about how linguistic features express social ideology. Different forms result in constructing meanings and the patterns of choices are ideologically significant. At the second level, it examines how meaning is generated by the interaction between text and reader. In the analysis of social context, it investigates the institutional, situational, cultural elements which influence the reports. The study shows that news reports not only reflect what happened about the world but also construct the world.There are three conclusions of the thesis. First, all the production and processing of semantics are cognitive-related, different ways of expressions illustrate different cognition. Through utilizing different ideology embedded discourses, CNN cryptically distorts the characterization of the incident and tries to mislead the readers to take the Chinese government as the scapegoat;Besides, news reports stand for the values and positions of governments and countries, for most media function on their behalf, including CNN’s news reports. The news reports only propaganda freedom and equality in name, but perform in their own benefit actually. In addition, news reporters make use of semantic and syntax strategies to organize language on purpose to convey their own values and standpoints. Power and ideology are hidden deeply in the language instead of being expressed obviously. People should increase their own critical reading awareness, in order to understand that language in news reports is chosen carefully rather than arbitrarily, and news reporters just present partial truth.