A Critical Discourse Analysis of News Reports

This book carries out a critical discourse analysis of two economic news reports found in China Daily and The New York Times covering Mattel’s recall of Chinese-made toys. Drawing upon Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of CDA and Halliday’s theory of Metafunctions Dr. Shunu Sun proposes a new analytical framework for analyzing economic news across cultural boundaries. In her framework data analysis is conducted at the levels of text discursive practice and social practice. The text of each article is broken down into 3 linguistic features: transitivity mood and modality and theme-rheme structure. Dr. Sun further examines the text through discourse representations to study the intertextuality of news discourse. She lastly investigates social practice within situational institutional and social contexts to justify the interpretation made in analyzing discursive practice. Findings reveal that economic news is not value-free but ideologically invested and determined by the underlying socio-cultural contexts.