A Critical Discourse Analysis Of The News Reports On 2018 China-US Trade War

As the world’s two largest economies,China and the US have started the trade war,which is undoubtedly of great concern to the world.The mass media with English as the medium have great discourse power,and their news reports usually influence readers’ opinions and judgments imperceptibly.Therefore,it is of great significance to correctly interpret and analyze the news reports related to the China-US trade war.As an important research object of critical discourse analysis(CDA),news discourses do not always represent social matters from an objective and fair perspective.In other words,news reporters often implicitly influence readers’ opinions and ideologies through various linguistic devices.In this regard,this thesis combines qualitative method with quantitative method to analyze 15 news reports on the China-US trade war respectively from The Washington Post and CNN.Adopting Fairclough’s three-dimensional model(TDM)as the theoretical framework and Halliday’s systemic functional grammar(SFG)as the analytical tool,this study is carried out from three dimensions: text,social practice and discourse practice.At the text level,it mainly describes the linguistic forms of these selected news reports from lexical choice,transitivity,transformation and thematic choice.At the discourse practice level,it mainly makes a detailed interpretation of the news sources,reporting modes and reporting verbs of these selected news discourses.At the social practice level,a detailed explanation is made for the ideology reflected in the text and social practice in terms of economic,political and social context.This study finds that the two news media seem objective and fair in reporting news,but they in fact employ various linguistic devices to convey ideologies to news readers.For instance,when it comes to China-related behaviors,words with accusatory and negative connotations are selected to make distorted reports,whereas in reporting US-related behaviors,most speeches are directly quoted from representatives to enhance credibility and persuasiveness,maintaining a good image for the US.What’smore,it turns out that Fairclough’s TDM and Halliday’s SFG can be combined to effectively dig out the ideologies hidden in these news discourse so that readers can have an in-depth understanding of the trade war issue.