Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On The Russia-ukraine Conflict: A Comparative Study Of The New York Times And China Daily

Since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in early 2022,great attention has been paid by Chinese and Western media.Due to the different ideological camps of China and the West,attitudes toward the conflict vary a lot.In this thesis,two influential news media in China and the US are selected: China Daily and The New York Times.To some extent,the two news agencies represent the overall purposes and value orientation towards the Russian-Ukraine conflict in both countries.By applying Fairclough’s three-dimensional model as the theoretical framework and adopting Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar as the analytical tool,this thesis aims to make a critical contrastive analysis of news reports on the Russian-Ukraine conflict collected from The New York Times and China Daily from three aspects:descriptive stage,interpretative stage and explanatory stage.The comparative analysis of news texts using the critical discourse analysis model can better explicate the ideological and power relations behind language,extending to the hegemony of media discourse nowadays.Furthermore,news readers should keep critical thinking in reading and raise their alertness to subtle ideological infiltration.According to the research findings,The New York Times keeps to the stand of Ukraine which is supported by NATO and the US,while China Daily remains relatively neutral and shows slight support for Russia,calling for peace talks and expressing sympathy for people who suffer a lot from the conflict.This study also finds that there are so many differences concerning the news discourses on the Russia-Ukraine conflict.Yet they can be broken into mainly three parts,linguistic differences in the descriptive stage,intertextual differences in the interpretative stage,and sociocultural differences in the explanatory stage.Through lexical classification,modality,news sources,and news reporting modes,China Daily and The New York Times expertly use news language with different ideological preferences to subtly influence readers’ understanding and judgment of the Russia-Ukraine conflict,effectively defending their respective interests.In descriptive stage,China Daily focuses more on the facts of the event with neutral descriptions of a certain topic.The New York Times uses more biased descriptions to depict Russia as the evil invader and Ukraine as the victim.In interpretive stage,Sources in China Daily usually come from both sides with a relatively neutral point of view and sometimes show favor to the Russian side.When it comes to The New York Times,most of its sources are Ukraine-supporting personnel expressing strong negative attitudes towards Russia.In explanatory stage,background matters most.China Daily usually represents the voice of China because it is a state-owned publication.Although The New York Times is not controlled by the government,it still serves as a useful means for the government to shape people’s opinions.