An Ideological Study On The Structure Of News Discourse

This thesis will examine the structures of discourse with a new paradigm of structural analysis to uncover the hidden ideology. It has one of its roots in van Dijk’s structural analysis, which consists of two levels-global structure and local structure. But given that his local structural analysis is not adequate enough, we replace it with another special analysis-social.network proposed by van Leeuwen whose adequacy resides in the representation of social actors and social actions, and refresh the whole theoretical framework. Global structure is still dominated by van Dijk’s topical analysis while local structure by van Leeuwen’s social network analysis. No matter which structure is dealt with, such a paradigm of structural analysis will help us probe into schematic structures and semantic structures of news discourse, and more importantly uncover the hidden ideologies.Considering that there is a stark distinction between China Daily and CNN on the characterization of Tian’anmen Crash, which has entailed a heated debate on defining terror attack, especially the report of CNN has arouse public resentment in China, we will carry out a structural analysis on two news reports as a case study. With the combination of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis and through the enlightening theoretical framework, we will accordingly illustrate how we analyze and what we find in different chapters of corpus analysis. The final results will be respectively compared and summarized from global structure and local structure. At last, some important moral and political implications from the structural analysis will be provided explicitly.We aim to uncover the American political purposes and improve our readers’ critical thinking ability. We also hope to complement the earlier structural analysis of van Dijk with new insights and invite other researchers to pay more attention to Social Network theory, and further develop it as well as structural analysis.