| In the process of outputting news discourse, it is hard for news reporters to keep a highly objective and impartial attitude. As a category of social practice, news reporting mostly carries certain value standards and social demands. Thus it can exert an implicit but profound influence on the audience’s views and beliefs. Among numerous ideologies embedded in news discourse, there is a salient and long-existing one which is concerned with gender issues, that is gender discrimination. Although progress has been made in the struggle against the false belief, there still exist many instances with sexist complexion. The media’s sociality determines its no exception and even a predominant role in transmitting such a biased ideology.This study aims to unveil gender discrimination hidden in political news from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which serves as an effective instrument to reveal the relationship between discourse and society. Besides, the study draws upon another two important linguistic theories to underpin the completion of CDA, namely Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Fairclough’s three-dimensional approach to discourse analysis. Specifically, the study is carried out under the framework of Fairclough’s three dimensions-text, discourse practice and social practice. The particular analytical tools are chosen from the scope of ideational metafunction and intertextuality. On the first dimension of text, news discourse is inspected from the perspective of transitivity and lexical choices; on the second dimension of discourse practice, the mode of discourse representation serves as the analytical tool in interpreting the relationship between discourse and social contexts; on the last dimension of social practice, the roots of news discourse ideology are traced and explained from historical, cultural and sociological perspectives. The research data stems from an authoritative US newspaper-The Washington Post. For the convenience of comparative analysis, all the selected reports are divided into two corpuses in terms of the reportee’s gender.Based on the above theories and methodologies, research results and findings are attained from detailed discourse analysis. The results present an obvious distinction between the media’s representing modes in reporting the female and male politicians. Diverse modes used by reporters involve the strategic choices in the categories of process and participant types, noun and adjective wording, and modes of discourse representation. Stateswomen are represented insufficiently and improperly by news discourse. The media’s attitude towards them is biased and even sexist. It indicates that although some women hold political positions at the same level with men, they still cannot enjoy the equal power and status as well as unbiased treatment in the fourth estate and even the whole society. The determinant reason is the ineradicable and ubiquitous historical, cultural and sociological contexts. Stateswomen’ subordinating status with limited power exertion in political news is a vivid reflection of the discriminatory ideology and asymmetric power relationship between the two genders in the current society.Academic value and practical significance of this study are mainly reflected in three aspects. The first layer of research significance is to dig out the meaning potentials in news discourse and reveal the ideologies and power relations embedded in it, by analyzing discourse as a unity of text, discourse practice and social practice. The particular focus of this study is the ideology of gender discrimination against stateswomen and asymmetric power relationship between the two genders in political circles. The second value of the study lies in the theoretical and methodological layers. The realization of CDA of news discourses is mainly attributed to the proper employment of theories and methodologies by combining Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework and Halliday’s SFL, and using the categories of process types, lexical choices and the mode of discourse representation under the theories of metafunction and intertextuality to specifically analyze discourse. Lastly, the study’s social significance lies in the endeavor to enhancing the audience’s critical discourse awareness and their ability to rationally reject unconscionable ideologies from the media and power-holders. After having a better understanding of ideologies including gender discrimination embedded in news reporting, the public may put more attention on social issues and take practical actions to remodel these biased ideologies. Such positive influence is of great benefit to the realization of a fully equal relationship among various social groups. |
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