A Critical Discourse Analysis Of CNN’s Coverage Of The Beijing Winter Olympics

In recent years,the economic crisis and the European debt crisis have brought great obstacles to the development of western society,while China’s international influence is gradually expanding.As the second major international event to be held against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic,the Beijing Winter Olympics have attracted global attention.During this period,is there any discourse inequality in the relevant reports on China by foreign mainstream media? The author finds that among the western media’s news reports on the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games,CNN is rich in number and diversity,while there is almost no research on CNN sports news in domestic academic circles.Therefore,CNN is taken as the research object in this study.Based on the statistics of CNN’s related reports on the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games,this paper selects 51 sample reports and conducts text analysis by using Fairclough’s three-layer discourse analysis and corpus tools.According to Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework,this paper firstly explores the text production and processing strategies of sample reports from the perspective of text dimension,and analyzes the categories,structures and modes of the reports’ titles.Secondly,from the perspective of discourse practice,CNN’s discourse strategies in topics,quotations and genres are analyzed.Then,from the perspective of social practice,the paper discusses the position and tendency of sample reports and the structural factors that affect report production.This paper finds that CNN’s reports on the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics focus on political reports with "human rights issues" as the core and security reports with "epidemic prevention measures" as the core.However,CNN’s reports on sports culture and athletes are linked to political issues.According to the study of sample reports,CNN’s politicized interpretation of Beijing Winter Olympics is reflected in the reports on different issues,and the differences between western "individualism" and Eastern "collectivism" are revealed in the reports.Then,this paper expounds the influential factors behind CNN news reporting,and finds that CNN media producers are mainly elites in The American society,and they make politicized interpretation of international news,which conforms to the reporting style of media.Finally,in order to improve China’s image in the international community,this paper first proposes countermeasures for the politicization of CNN’s coverage of the Beijing Winter Olympics,that is,using new media and uniting with emerging countries to cope with the pan-political communication led by the Western society.Secondly,it puts forward specific suggestions on China’s external sports communication,that is,China’s green and environmental protection plan should be presented to the international community,and more efforts should be made to promote sports culture and sports figures to "go out",and use cross-cultural communication thinking to tell Chinese sports stories well.