A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On Thaad Issues From China Daily,the New York Times And The Korea Times

On February 27,2017,Lotte announced that it would provide land for the THAAD system,which is to be deployed by the United States in South Korea.Such an announcement aroused widespread concerns internationally.This study focuses on the reports by media in China,the United States and South Korea on the THAAD issue.Two important time points of THAAD follow-up process were chosen.Six pieces of news reports from China Daily,The New York Times and The Korea Times were selected as corpora.Based on Fariclough's three-dimensional framework,a critical discourse analysis was made on these six pieces of news.Through the processes of description(classification,modality and transitivity),explanation(news source and modes)and interpretation(institutional context,political and economic context),it has been found that although news coverage from the three different media was of the same,due to different ideologies of different media,their standpoints were different.China Daily,from the perspective of THAAD installation,conveyed that U.S.and South Korea should stop such an action;reports from New York Times suggested that installing THAAD was the result of North Korean artillery drills.And U.S.would stand with its ally;news from The Korea Times explained that the installation of THAAD was a self-defense measure and criticized the boycott from China.In this research,news reports from these three media were selected as samples for this particular event,which has enriched the scope of critical discourse analysis studies.And this study suggests that linguistic knowledge should be used during reading news reports so as to improve readers' critical reading awareness and ability.