A Comparative Appraisal Of News Coverage On Cyber Attacks By New York Times And China Daily

News Coverage has played an important role in people's daily life. This popular information access is required to be emotionless and objective. However, the reporters' attitudes, with a great impact on readers, can always be found in the reports. It's therefore vitally important to gain a greater understanding of mass media discourse and to uncover the stance and attitude suggested by the news coverage, as well as how much discourse has changed over a period of time.Appraisal Theory is an ideal analytical system with a set of linguistic resources which can reflect the evaluation, attitude and emotion of the addressor. Appraisal Theory is consisted of Attitude, Graduation and Engagement subsystems. Martin puts forward the idea that engagement framework focuses on the interaction and negotiation of various opinions and stances, hence has great influence on evaluating issues, adopting stances and managing interpersonal positions (Martin 2000)[1]. The Engagement system can be further divided into dialogic contraction and expansion, which concerned with how inter-subjective relation of alignment and disalignment is built and negotiated to perform rhetorical functions. This thesis aims to employ engagement evaluation to uncover the attitudes maintained by New York Times and China Daily on cyber attacks from the appraisal perspective.Cyber attacks have become a major concern in news reporting, especially after the Edward Snowden Affair happened. Therefore, news coverage of cyber attacks has been chosen as the study target. Concerning the conveyance of attitudes maintained by news reports, this study is investigated at two levels. For the first level, the statistic results manifesting the distribution of engagement resources in the selected news from UAM corpus tool are analyzed to reveal how these engagement resources are employed by the reporters to engage in an ideological attitude in their news reporting; for the second level, a comparative study has been conducted to explore the ideologies and subjective stance encoded in the two newspapers synchronically. What's more, the two newspapers are compared diachronically to see if their attitudes changed over time.The findings suggest that a similar distribution of engagement resources in the cyber attack news are employed when embed attitudes. The reporters prefer to adopt expand type by opening up the interactions and negotiations with the alternative resources than contract type of closing down the space for dialogical alternative. The use of Contract resources mainly aim to proclaim their position, and the expand resources are employed to introduce more neutral voices to certify their position. Secondly, China Daily and New York Times hold different attitudes to Cyber attacks. Specifically, New York Times proclaim China's hacking behavior against U.S. and China daily states its innocence and it's also a victim of cyber attacks. In addition, after the Edward Snowden Affair happened, attitude by China Daily changes to adopt more external positions to accuse American PRISM project, while New York Times remains blaming Chinese cyber attacks without mention it's monitoring behavior.A large portion of the studies on news reporting have been conducted from a sociological perspective, focusing on areas such as news production, the organization of news media and media system. Although some researchers have even examined political or social aspects of news processing in their attempts to show how events are reported or manipulated for political purposes, few studies actually approached news studies from a linguistic or discourse perspective. Therefore, it is essential to make a systematic analysis of news reports from the perspective of Appraisal Theory, a linguistic system. Moreover, Cyber attack has become a hot topic nowadays. It may help readers all over the world to get a better understanding of the attitudes behind the news reports. It's hoped that the findings reported here will contribute useful information to the collection of news discourse studies which examine and identity discourse strategies in news reports of various newspapers around the world.