| The “Black Lives Matter” protests that engulfed American in 2020 have attracted a lot of media’s attention,and different media in America have expressed different attitudes towards it.Against such a condition,this thesis employs CDA as its theoretical framework,transitivity system proposed by Halliday and Matthiessen as its analytical framework,and conducts a contrastive analysis of the representation of violence appeared in news articles reported by CNN and Fox News during the BLM protests.Through the contrastive analysis,the ideologies hidden behind the news articles are revealed,and the reasons why these two media choose specific transitivity patterns are explored.Two small corpora are built for analysis.41 discourses are selected,with 30 from CNN and 11 from Fox News,23343 words in total.The quantitative analyses in this study conduct transitivity analysis both at clausal and lexical levels,in which the former applies the transitivity system proposed by Halliday as the framework to analyze process types and participant roles,the latter applies the subcategorization of material process and the circumstantial categories proposed by Halliday and Matthiessen as the framework to analyze the lexical meanings of verbs in material processes and the circumstantial elements.The corpora are annotated manually.SPSS and R software are used for quantitative analysis.The result of the analyses at clausal level shows that while both CNN and Fox News adopted all the six process types,with their percentage similar to each other,the two news media differ greatly in the distribution of participant roles associated with material processes.More specifically,CNN tends to activate the police by portraying them more frequently as an Actor(68.5%)while passivate the demonstrators by portraying them more frequently as a Goal(78.0%).Fox News is doing the opposite,activating the demonstrators(72.7%)while passivating the police(55.9%).The result of the analyses at lexical level shows that such difference appears most frequently in violent process.CNN tends to describe the police as the Actor(83.6%)of violent actions while portray the demonstrators as the Goal(82.2%)of the same processes.Fox News,on the contrary,put the demonstrators more often as the Actor(77.4%)of the violent actions and the police as the Goal(48.2%).The analysis on circumstantial elements also shows that CNN pays more attention to the description of police(61.3%),while Fox News pays more attention to the description of demonstrators(70.4%),which make their representation of political protests tendentious.This result is consistent with the result obtained from the analyses at clausal level.Through particular choices of transitivity patterns,these two news media construct their own understandings of the violent protests which highlight one party’s violent actions and underscore the other party as the victim.An interpretation of such differential media representation is that CNN tends to illegalize the police’s actions while Fox News tends to illegalize the demonstrators’.This binary division of world can help the news media construct images of "us" and "them",in which "us" is often described as a group that accepts and follows the law,cracking down on "them" who violate the law.By framing a single world view of “us”and “them”,the mass media make it easy for their readers to accept “our” actions and hate “theirs”.This contrast pattern of transitivity choice made by the two news media is in line with their own ideological positions.This paper applies the transitivity system of SFG to quantitative analysis of news articles,thereby shedding some new insights on both the critical discourse analysis and the approach of corpus-assisted discourse study,and reminding readers to maintain independent thinking when reading. |
