Analysing Newspapers

Contrastive Analysis of Lexical Choice and Ideologies in News Reporting the Same Accidents between Chinese and American Newspapers

“…Newspaper discourse has always announced its objectivity and impartiality towards the world, but with the birth of CDA, critical linguists and scholars have interrogated the assertion. Richardson (2007) has stated that, Journalistic discourse has some very specific textual characteristics, some very specific method of text production and consumption, and is defined by a particular set of relationships between itself and other agencies of symbolic and material power. These three sets of characteristics -that is, the language of journalism, its production and consumption and the relations of journalism to social ideas and institutions -are clearly inter-related and sometimes difficult to disentangle (p.1).…”

“…Among these, critical discourse analysis (CDA) is an important discipline and a method aiming to disclose the relationship between language and ideology through analysis of text features in discourses and the context in which the text is produced. Through years, CDA scholars such as Bell (1991), Fowler (1991), Fowler et al (1979), Fairclough (1989), Richardson (2007), Teo (2000) and van Dijk (2001) have found that news is never a value-free vehicle, but an ideological social practice. Though press throughout the world claims factuality, objectivity and neutrality in its news reporting, news actually not only reports the matters but reflects the attitudes of the reporters towards the events.…”

The Local Relevance of Global Suffering: Articulations of Identities and Cosmopolitanism in Television News Discourses on Distant Suffering

“…Critical discourse analysts typically stress 'patterns of domination whereby one social group is dominated by another' (Phillips 2006: 288) such as the above mentioned sociocultural binary and the power asymmetries that are linked to the mediation of global suffering. According to Richardson (2007), CDA is mainly used to explore how discourses are realized linguistically in texts to constitute knowledge and social relations, such as a relationship of identification or compassion with a distant Other. For this purpose, I combine the work and methodological approach of two leading scholars within the field of CDA.…”

“…According to Richardson (2007), analysing a text is analysing the choices made by the author of that text. I particularly examine the way in which the authors of the text invite their Belgian audience to relate to the Other in need.…”

“…News discourse is also permeated by structures, institutions and values from outside the newsroom such as economy, politics and ideology (Richardson 2007). Referring to these wider practices, one should ask whether the news texts will reproduce inequalities and other undesirable social practices or, on the contrary, help to encourage cosmopolitanist identifications.…”