| Critical discourse analysis(CDA)is an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing the discourses,which is widely used to study the media discourse.It aims to reveal the hidden social values and ideologies in the discourses by analyzing the linguistic features.The success of the 2018 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation(FOCAC)opens a new chapter of China-Africa cooperation,which attracts the worldwide attention.The media abroad and at home report on this summit in different ways.The study will make an analysis of news reports on economy and politics about the 2018 Beijing Summit of the FOCAC from the perspective of CDA,which is aimed at revealing how the language in news reports is affected even controlled by ideologies,thus the dialectical relationship among discourse,power and ideology will be disclosed.The author selects fourteen news reports on economy and politics about the 2018 Beijing Summit of the FOCAC from the official websites of The Washington Post and China Daily as the research objects.Among them,five samples are from The Washington Post with a total of 4,808 words and nine samples are selected from China Daily with 5,022 words in total.The study takes Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Halliday’s systemic functional grammar(SFG)as the theoretical foundation and adopts the qualitative and quantitative methods to conduct the analysis of the selected news reports at three stages.At the description stage,the linguistic characteristics will be explored from the aspects of lexical choice,transitivity and modality.At the interpretation stage,the author will analyze the news sources and reporting modes of news reports from the perspective of intertextuality.At the explanation stage,by analyzing the institutional context,economic context and social-cultural context,the study elucidates the reasons for different choices at the textual and discursive levels,thus revealing the hidden ideologies in news discourses.The major findings can be concluded as follows.Firstly,reporters of the two media employ different words or expressions,modal verbs and types of processes at the stage of description.At the interpretation stage,the proportions that the specific sources and direct speeches account for in China Daily are both higher than those in The Washington Post,which indicates that the reports from China Daily are comparatively objective and more convincing.Secondly,the news reports are not absolutely objective as the media claim.Reporters are apt to adopt certain information sources which accord with the institution’s attitudes and stances to embed the ideologies into news reports.China Daily conveys the significance of FOCAC and depicts a positive image of China.On the contrary,The Washington Post,which represents and maintains the America’s interests,describes China’s financial aids as a debt trap and a means of performing a new version of colonialism,intentionally portraying an aggressive and negative image of China.Lastly,the reasons for the ideological differences in news discourses on economy and politics about the 2018 Beijing Summit of the FOCAC in China Daily and The Washington Post can be explained in terms of institutional context,economic context and social-cultural context.This study is provided with certain theoretical and practical significance.Firstly,as the international communication becomes more frequent today,this research extends the application of CDA to the research field of international conferences.What’s more,it can be found that China Daily,as an authoritative media,sets a good example for other mainstream media in reporting objectively,enhancing the discourse power and building China’s image.Last but not least,news reports are not absolutely objective and fair.When reporting the same event,diversified media deliver diverse ideologies due to the different political stances and social-cultural backgrounds,which requires the readers to enhance the critical reading awareness and advance discrimination abilities in the process of reading news discourses. |
