1。3  Literature Review

1。3。1 Research on News Discourse

News is information about current or future events。 Mass media is an important means indispensable for disseminating information in modern society。 Journalists provide news through many different media, for example, broadcasting, printing, and electronic communication。 People who live in the Information Explosion Age have an enormous desire to know events happening around the world。 However, the limit of space and time makes people heavily depend on news to be involved in the world。 Although news are supposed to be exactly what happened or what will happen and free of any value, the fact is that every piece of news is selected and processed by journalists and editors who are greatly affected by the media they work for and thus can never be value-free。 And thus news language is bound to be a target of CDA researchers。

Bell (Bell&Garrett, 1998:3) gives four main reasons for the studies of media discourse: Firstly, media are a rich source of easily accessible data for research。 Secondly, media usage influences and represents people’s use of and attitudes towards language in a speech community。 Thirdly, media language can tell us a great deal about social meanings and stereotypes projected through language and communication。 Fourthly, media reflect and influence the formation and expression of culture, politics and social life。 Within media, news is the primary language genre and is seen as the focus of media content。 People in society, to a great extent, tend to depend upon the media for knowing what’s happening around the world。 It is through news reports that people are able to know the recent events, the lives of other people, and the customs and cultures of other nations。 News reports not only provide readers with information, pleasure and enjoyment, but also influence their perception, attitude and behavior。  论文网

Most media critics, such as Chomsky, Fishman and CDA practitioners Van Dijk, Fairclough and Fowler argue that the mainstream media does not just reflect the reality, but rather is constrained by the economic, political and institutional ownership which prevent media from giving objective reports。

The systematic study of news dates back to the 1920s when the rapid development of mass communication attracted wide attention and interests in both America and the European Continent。 While the approach of media sociology was prevalent in the US, critical news study flourished in the Europe。 The scholars of this approach criticize that there exist unequal power relations in the social economic and political contexts。 These unequal power relations will influence news production and consumption。 Through analyzing news discourse in a critical way, they try to find out the unequal power relations and the ideology carried in news discourse and also explain the cause of these unequal relations。

The linguistic or discourse studies of news began from Roger Fowler and his associates (Fowler, Hodge, Kress& Trew, 1979), who provide a linguistic checklist for discourse analysis like lexical structure, modality, speech acts, and also the study of transitivity in syntax which uses Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (1985); similar approach was used in van Dijk’s critical studies of international news and racism in the press (1988)。 The influence and constitutive force of media help the powerful to make use of these ideology-loaded weapons to achieve the goal of mind controlling, while at the same time shun from possible accusations of conducting any manipulation。 These tricky strategies have become the targets of many critics。

1。3。2 Research on CDA

Norman Fairclough (1989) makes great contribution to the development of CDA by proposing the three-dimensional framework in the book entitled Language and Power。 The three dimensions are: description, interpretation and explanation。 He has written extensively on news discourse and suggested that systematic studies of news discourse should be made。 He also references Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar。 Later, Fairclough’s work Analyzing Discourse: Text Analysis for Social Research was published in 2003, in which he improves his three-dimensional framework and provides a more comprehensive and universal model for CDA。