An Analysis Of Reports By New York Times On American School Shooting From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

In the age of information explosion, people increasingly depend on the massmedia and tend to believe that the reporters objectively present the whole truth ofevents. Nevertheless, driven by partisan interests and commercial purposes, newsreports are not presented as objectively as assumed. Floyd (2000:43) mentions thatnews reports seem to be fair, but are strategically loaded with the reporter’s bias andpreference. After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut, theinternet was bombarded with news coverage. The majority of people ascribed thistragedy to the availability of firearm, culture of violence, mental illness and schoolbullying, etc. Interestingly, however，there were some voices questioning and blamingthat the mass media were also partly responsible. This thesis attempts to explore theways the media report the disaster news and to express attitude within the frameworkof Martin’s Appraisal Theory, which focuses on how the language users adoptevaluative lexis to express their attitudes, stances and ideologies hardly or rarelyexplained by other linguistic theories (Wang Zhenhua,2001).Goals expected to achieve are as follows:(1) to understand the distribution ofappraisal resources in the news reports;(2) to study how the appraisal resources arerealized in the language materials as well as how the reporters exercise influences onthe readers with such resources;(3) to discuss if the news reports will exert negativeimpacts on readers;(4) to explore whether the appraisal resources applied in thedifferent events are demonstrated differently.Taking the Virginia Tech shooting in2007and the Sandy Hook ElementarySchool shooting in2012as the research objects, this thesis intends to analyze therelevant news reports from New York Times through quantitative and qualitativeanalyses using UAM Corpus Tool2.8.14as the statistic tool. The two shootings areconsidered to be two deadliest massacres in the USA by Wikipedia. This thesis arrivesat the following conclusions:(1) Appraisal resources are widely employed by the news writers, with thenumber of occurrence amounting to1425times, demonstrating that the news reportsare more an evaluative writing than an objective one. (2) The news text represents its solidarity with heteroglossic diversity.(3) The mass media may trigger a “copycat effect”(Coleman,2004) on certainpeople by devoting too much attention to the perpetrators of the shootings.(4) Appraisal resources embodied in each event enjoy the same tendency, butthe exact proportion is different. These characteristics are related to such factors asjournalistic professionalism in America, news values in the West, social functions ofnews in the English environment and commercialization of the media, etc.This study may help the readers to form a better understanding of news reportsand improve their perception and judgment. Meanwhile, English teachers aresuggested to pay more attention to the cultivation of the students’ critical awarenessfor news reading. By analyzing the functions of each system in the Appraisal Theory,this study also contributes to news writing, in addition to testing and enriching theAppraisal Theory.