| The outbreak of COVID-19 in late 2019 drew attention to the importance of information disseminated through mass media,which plays a crucial role in shaping public perception.For example,the coverage of Dr.Fauci,an infectious disease expert,varied significantly among mainstream media outlets in the United States due to political polarization.This thesis employs Discursive News Value Analysis(DNVA)to analyze tweets about Dr.Fauci from four major news media outlets – The New York Times,Fox News,The New York Post,and The Washington Post and conducts a comprehensive critical discourse analysis from an interdisciplinary perspective,combining quantitative and qualitative analysis.Based on 1104 tweets collected,we first retrieved the frequency and collocations of the node word “Fauci”,and then annotated news values and calculate their proportions of the concordance lines.Then,the social actor theory and visual grammar theory proposed by van Leeuwen are employed to qualitatively analyze the composition of social actors in media discourse to explore the construction of Fauci’s images in American mainstream social media.The findings indicate that Proximity,Superlativeness,Negativity,and Timeliness are the most prominent news values among the four types of media.As for verbal modality,the conservative media,in particular,favor sharp criticism of right-wing politicians and propagate the “Wuhan” conspiracy theory to attack China.By contrast,liberal media coverage was more moderate,as evidenced by The Washington Post’s coverage of Fauci’s pushback against Republican Senator Rand Paul.All four types of media shared the news value of Timeliness.In terms of visual modality,all media use facial expressions and body gestures to convey news values such as Negativity,Proximity,and Superlativeness,while Timeliness and Unexpectedness are more relevant in The New York Times and The Washington Post.Interactive meaning is mainly constructed through social distance and perspective based on visual grammar.The differences are that liberal media prefer oblique low angle and medium shots,while conservative media favor frontal angles and close-up shots,indicating a higher degree of intimacy with readers.This study helps to reveal that partisan struggles have exacerbated the media polarization and political bias of public opinion.Instead of acting as a “mediator” between liberals and conservatives,the media has become a trigger and catalyst for increased partisanship.This study contributes to our understanding of the role of news values in shaping media coverage and their impact on public discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic. |
