A Critical Discourse Analysis Of The News Reports On Paris Attack In Cable News Network And China Daily

As a carrier of information transfer,news media should report the news with a neutral and objective method.Nevertheless,due to the influence of a certain social,cultural context and power relationship,news discourse has implied some particular stances and attitudes of the presses.Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA),developing from critical linguistics,aims to investigate the deeper relationships between language,power and ideology.It has been regarded as one of the significant analysis models in the studies of news discourse.As one of the hot issues in the year of 2015,Paris Attack has attracted wide attention all over the world.Because of different political stances,the United States and China have different attitudes towards Paris Attack.As the important news media of each country,CNN and China Daily can be considered as representatives of the two countries' media.From a dialectical and constructive perspective of language,Fairclough's three-dimensional model has provided a systematic and comprehensive method for news discourse analysis.Based on this model as the theoretical framework,by applying Halliday's functional grammar: ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function as an important analytic tool,the author aims to conduct a critical contrastive analysis of the ten news reports on Paris Attack.They are collected from CNN and China Daily and analyzed in three stages: linguistic practice,discursive practice and social practice.In linguistic practice,the ideational differences of the two media have been explored from transitivity and classification;the interpersonal differences have been investigated from modality.And in discursive practice,the differences have been examined from the perspectives of news source and reporting modes.In social practice,the differences of the explanation part have been explored by therelated institutional context of the two media and social context on Paris Attack.According to the above three stages of analysis,not only the hidden relationships between language,power and ideology of these reports,but also the particular approaches for the presses to penetrate its political viewpoints into news discourse could be uncovered.The study has clarified that the news reports on Paris Attack published by the two media CNN and China Daily are really different.CNN is in favor of the U.S.who says that it will ally with France all the time and they are families.However,in fact,it only cares about its own interests with a one-sided language in order to describe a negative picture of France and holds a quite different criteria of counter-terrorism.While China Daily does not approve of it.And it is opposed to all forms of terrorism,the international community should take consistent position in a more objective language.The findings connote that it is essential to raise language learners' critical language awareness when they read the news reports.CDA should also be taught in classrooms from the perspective of pedagogics,it can be as a supplement of language courses to linguistic knowledge in order to help promote the awareness of language learners.Thus,the learners will acknowledge how discourse molds readers' viewpoints.In terms of the translation practice,critical awareness is also necessary and indispensable.The interpreters and translators should not only put emphasis on the text equivalence between the original text and translation,but also take account of social,cultural and ideological aspects under the guidance of critical awareness.