An Appraisal Approach To China-related COVID-19 Pandemic Reports Of Major American News Media

The COVID-19 pandemic is a major public health event,in addition,related news reports reflect the values and stances of corresponding media,so analyzing COVID-19 related news reports from official media can indicate connotative meaning in an in-depth layer.This can promote people’s deep understanding of these news reports.In order to explore China-related COVID-19 pandemic reports deeply,this study took Appraisal theory from Martin and Rose(2003)as a guide,and took three major mainstream media in the United States,The New York Times,The Washington Post,and The Los Angeles Times as the main medium,then selected China-related COVID-19 pandemic reports in these three media as research subjects,trying to answer the following questions:1.What features does the distribution of appraisal resources reflect in the three media from 2019 to 2022,then what are the differences and similarities?2.What attitude and position do these three media outlets reflect through this distribution?This study adopted the UAM Corpus Tool 3.3 to annotate and handle 60 news pieces which yielded three conclusions as follows:First of all,in terms of the distribution of appraisal resources,these three newspapers are roughly the same in the distribution of the three subsystems.There is a difference in the choice of news issues and the subject of attitude resources.This study also concludes that there is a significant difference in the distribution of affect resources,judgement resources,appreciation resources and force resources among three newspapers through single factor analysis of variance and non-parametric test.Secondly,through the specific analysis of appraisal resources,it was found that these three American media tend to present China’s deficiencies in multiple dimensions,such as vaccine development,environment protection and the tourism.Finally,the impact of news discourse on readers is not one-dimensional,but a fusion of emotional foundation,inter-subjectivity,and language intensity.Through this study,a better understanding of the significance of applying appraisal resources to analyze news discourse can be drawn.This will allow us to see more clearly that news discourse is not purely objective and journalists selectively apply specific appraisal resources to the discourse,thus reaching the purpose of expressing their own ideas and influencing readers.This study can also provide readers with practical insights into identifying these appraisal resources in time as well as thinking critically about the views expressed in the discourse.