Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On China's Military Parade

This study focused on the Chinese and foreign news reports on China' s military parade,which was held on 3rd September 2015 in Beijing.The military parade attracted the close attention of media both at hom e and abroad so that m any reports have been made on it,among which The Guardian and China Daily reported the military parade in different ways.Therefore,the selected news discourses were analyzed under the framework of critical discourse analysis(CDA)in the study,which aimed to reveal the hidden ideology in the news reports and unc over the relationship between ideology and language.Forty-three news reports were selected from The Guardian and China Daily,among which 17 samples were from The Guardian with the total words 15822 and 26 samples were from China Daily with the total words 15823.The study was conducted based on the theoretical fram ework of Fairclough' s three-dimensional model and Halliday's systemic functional grammar.Meanwhile,qu antitative and qualitative methods were adopted to analyze the data in the study.At the description stage,lexical classification,modality and transitivity were taken as analytical tools to study the news reports.At the interpersonal stage,the news reports were analyzed from the perspective of reporting mode and news source.At the explanation stage,a contrastive analysis was conducted at social context level and historical level.The major findings are concluded as follows:Firstly,at the text level,the disparities of the two newspapers are obvious.As to lexical classification,The Guardian stresses the aggressive characteristics of China and employs vague languages to hide key inform ation,while China Daily delivers full and complete information of China's military parade to read ers,which shows that The Guardian is less objective than China Daily.As to m odality,the percentages of the median and low modality in China Daily are higher than those in The Guardian.What's more,the high-value modality in China Daily occupies 4% and is lower than that in The Guardian,which demonstrates that The Guardian adopts stronger judgments to describe the parade.As to transitivity,The Guardian holds a relative nega tive attitudes towards the parade and im plies that the aim by holding the parade is to show of f the nation's strong power and force,while China Daily states the facts with a fair attitude.Secondly,at the discourse practice level,there still exist dif ferences between The Guardian and China Daily.As to reporting m ode,the percentage of direct sp eech in The Guardian is 69%,while China Daily accounts for 55%.The percentages of indirect speech are 31% and 4 5% in The Guardian and China Daily respectively.From the statistics,the news reports in The Guardian seem more objective th an China Daily,however,at the deep level,the reports in The Guardian are contrary to the facts.When it comes to news source,the percen tage of specific source in The Guardian is 81%,while China Daily takes up 94%.What's more,the percentage of semi-identified source is 13% in The Guardian,while the percentage is 4% in China Daily,from which it can be seen that China Daily is more convincing than The Guardian.Thirdly,at the social p ractice level,the ideologies implied in the news reports of different news agencies are influenced by social,cultural and historical factors.The study reflects that different news agencies deliver different ideologies when they report the sam e event,which can have an influence on the read ers.For reporters,the reports of political events sh ould be reported in a n accurate,objective and comprehensive way.Therefore,it is neces sary for the reporters to enhance their professional skills,enrich their s ocial and cultural knowledge and build up an appropriate professional morality.For readers,to analyze th e news reports cr itically is of crucial importance.