A Cultural Discourse Study Of News Reports On "COVID-19" In Chinese And American Mainstream Newspapers

In the era of globalization,the destinies of all countries are closely related to each other.COVID-19 epidemic that broke out at the end of 2019 is a major public health emergency with extremely fast transmission speed,wide infection range and great difficulty in prevention and control.The outbreak soon became a global crisis.Domestic and foreign media have made a lot of reports on the epidemic in China,with topics related to the description of the epidemic,China’s anti-epidemic measures,the impact of the epidemic,vaccine development and so on.News is influenced by culture.For the same event,the news reports in different cultural environments show different discourse features and implied cultural and historical factors,so as to convey different purposes and public opinion directions to the audience.The existing researches mainly study COVID-19 epidemic from the perspectives of medicine,communication,psychology and management.At the linguistic level,the researches are mainly from the critical discourse analysis(CDA)and cognitive linguistics level to study the news reports on COVID-19.From the perspective of cultural discourse studies(CDS),a scholar has analyzed the news reports on COVID-19 in the American magazine Time.From a cultural perspective,this research uses the analytical framework of cultural discourse studies to make a contrastive research on the China-related news reports on COVID-19 from Chinese and American mainstream newspapers,China Daily and the New York Times.In this research,all news reports from China Daily and the New York Times during the period of “Wuhan Lockdown” from January 23 rd,2020 to April 8th,2020 are selected as the research corpus.The purpose of this research is to analyze the following questions: Who are the subjects of the news reports? What news discourse intents are presented and through what discourse forms? What effects and purposes have the news reports conveyed? What cultural and historical factors are implied in the news discourse of the two newspapers?In this research,the corpus Lexis Nexis is used to collect news language materials and two corpora are built.The two corpora are analyzed by combining quantitative and qualitative methods.With the help of corpus analysis software Ant Conc3.5.8 and Sketch Engine,the subjects and intents of the discourse are quantitatively analyzed.Based on the theoretical framework of cultural discourse studies,this research makes a qualitative analysis of the forms,purposes,effects,the cultural and historical factors implied in the news discourse and explores the discourse characteristics of the news reports of the two newspapers.The major findings of this research are as follows:(1)The subjects of the news reports in the two newspapers are of six categories: journalists,government departments and officials,companies and organizations,experts and scholars,ordinary people and foreign people.(2)In terms of speech intents,the news reports mainly focus on the following topics: the outbreak and progress of COVID-19 epidemic;progress of national and regional prevention and control during the epidemic;medical assistance;the political,economic and people’s livelihood situation of the country during the epidemic;real-time reports on epidemic data and interpretation of epidemic development according to data.In terms of speech forms,these news reports mainly adopt three discourse strategies: metaphor,intertextuality and fuzzy language.The two newspapers use a large number of war metaphors and competition metaphors to make the audience realize the threat and urgency of the epidemic.The use of intertextuality strategy in news discourse connects events in news with events outside news on purpose,so as to convey the literal and implied meaning.The use of fuzzy language helps the reporters not only convey the meaning but also evade the responsibility.(3)In terms of the purposes and effects,China Daily shows the success of China’s domestic anti-epidemic and active assistance to the international anti-epidemic campaign,spreads the values of “community of shared future for mankind(CSFM)”,and shapes the image of China as a responsible power.In the name of reporting the epidemic situation in China,some news reports in the New York Times try to spread false information to stigmatize China,and intentionally guide the international community to point the attack at China and make adverse effects on China’s international status and influence.(4)In terms of the cultural and historical factors,based on cultural dimension theory,this research finds that the news discourse of China Daily embodies the characteristics of Chinese culture,such as collectivism,high power distance,high uncertainty avoidance,feminality tendency and long-term orientation.The news reports in the New York Times reflect that American culture is characterized by individualism,low power distance,low uncertainty avoidance,masculinity tendency and short-term orientation.This research further verifies and supports the feasibility of applying the cultural discourse studies to analyze news reports and enriches the research perspective for the interpretation of the news reports on COVID-19 epidemic.This research explores the historical and cultural factors implied in the China-related news reports on COVID-19 from China Daily and the New York Times from a cultural perspective,which is conducive to people’s better coping with epidemic and understanding the news discourses on the premise of having knowledge of the historical and cultural backgrounds of different countries.