A Study On Gender Differences In Online News Discourse From The Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective

Since the beginning of feminist movement,the gender bias phenomenon in media as an academic issue got people’s attention.After 1960s,the feminist movement turned its focus on gender inequality from political campaign to daily life.Thus,feminism gradually developed itself to an interdisciplinary field,therefore extending to various branches of social sciences.The study of media and women became a hot topic in news discourse research once it was introduced to China.In this field,the gender inequality in traditional media has always been grabbing plenty of attention.Along with the rapid development of new media technology and mobile internet technology,there is an increasing trend that people tend to acquire news from internet to know the world.New media,especially internet media news have played an increasingly important role in people’s daily life.Unfortunately,however,news reports in online outlets still keep the gender biased ideology as traditional media do.However,most research focus of gender issues in media has been on the traditional media.Thus,the gender issue in online news reports is also worthy of discussing.This thesis investigates the gender differences inside the online news discourse.This thesis studied news reports in 2017 in the news division of Tencent’s website from critical discourse analysis perspective,by applying content analysis,text analysis and transitivity analysis to the online news discourse to conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis.First,the thesis starts from content analysis and text analysis,by comparing the subjects of reports in the following aspects:gender,role,report type,report topic,address,metaphors and etc.Then it found that in online news reports the coverage on male takes the majority part,that the reports on female are relatively fewer than that of male,that the reports about female mainly focus on soft news,that there are more negative descriptions than positive descriptions on female,that female are depicted as the weak and subordinate,that reports on female do not escape the portrayal on appearance,and that the traditional stereotypes of female still exist.Next,by combing with transitivity,the thesis looked into the distribution of different processes and found that the reports on female are less objective that those on male,that the portrayal of women’s ability is not affirmative,and that the female image is still in disadvantage.This thesis focuses on the hidden ideology in the discourse,digging into the latent gender biased phenomenon.And therefore it aims at patriarchy and its ideology,and it is beneficial in bringing people’s attention and reflection on gender issues,thus helping to construct partnership of equals.