| Critical discourse analysis is a new method of discourse analysis, which focuses on the construction and meaning of discourses, and emphasizes the exploration of values and ideologies behind discourses. Critical discourse analysis is different from traditional methods of discourse analysis as it puts discourse analysis in the social context to explore the relationship among language, power and ideology. More and more scholars try to apply critical discourse analysis to the analysis of different types of discourses. As public discourses for people to attain information, news discourses have the necessity to be true and objective. However, because of the social background in which the news happens and because of values and ideologies of news reporters, the objectivity of news discourses needs to be considered again.This thesis aims at exploring how the news reporters convey their attitudes and ideologies by the construction of news discourse through the analysis of ten news samples about Shanghai Stampede respectively selected from China Daily and The Washington Post. This thesis conducts a critical and comparative analysis from three dimensions which are text, discourse practice and socio-cultural practice with the application of Fairclough’s three-dimensional model. At the stage of text analysis, transitivity, classification and modality have been analyzed to describe the text. At the stage of discourse practice, news sources and reporting modes have been analyzed to understand the process of discourse construction and its influences on interpretation. At the stage of socio-cultural practice, social and institutional context have been explored to uncover the reasons of embedded ideologies to provide a clear presentation of the relationship among language, power and ideology.From the analysis, it can be concluded that the attitudes shown in the reports on Shanghai Stampede in the two news media have great differences. The differences are revealed by linguistic structures. The different choices of the linguistic structures lie in transitivity, classification, modality, news source and reporting mode. The choices serve for the news producers’ values and ideologies. China Daily hopes to increase people’s confidence towards the current social system by describing the immediate measures taken by the authority after the tragedy and officials’ concern towards the event. On the contrary, The Washington Post aims at creating a negative image of China by reporting inadequate preventable measures and people’s anger. Therefore, news reports are not found to be objective as the countries’ political and social values will exert great influences on them. As a result, people should consider the information provided by the news reports critically and improve their critical awareness in the process of reading. |
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