Vietnam national university hanoi College of foreign languages and international studies Postgraduate department NGUYỄN THU TRANG A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF CNN ONLINE AND BBC ONLINE NEWS ON BEIJING OLYMPICS 2008 (PH¢N TÝCH DIÔN NG¤N PH£ PH¸N TIN TøC TRUYÒN TH¤NG VÒ OLYMPICS B¾C KINH 2008 TR£N B¸O §IÖN Tö CNN Vµ BBC) M. minor thesis Field: English Linguistics Code: 60 22 15 HANOI, 2009 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. ii LIST OF TABLES. Rationale of the study.
Aims and objectives of the study. Scope of the study. Methods of the study. Design of the study.
Critical Discourse Analysis. What is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)?. The history of CDA. Critical, ideology and power.
A review of media news discourse studies. Systematic functional grammar and its role in CDA. 10 Chapter III: A Critical Discourse Analysis of CNN Online and BBC Online News on Beijing Olympics 2008. Content and presentation analysis.
The use of pictures and videos. Use of neutral referring expressions for the event. Use positive references to indicate the Games. An analysis of two sample texts.
23 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. Syntactic structure analysis .1 The use of transitive and intransitive sentences. The use of active and passive voices. Suggestions for further study .I LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com iii LIST OF TABLES Table 1.
Summary of process types (adapted from Halliday, 1994) Table 2: Topics focused in BBC online Table 3: Topics focused in CNN online Table 4: Wording of competition fields in headlines of BBC online and CNN online Table 5. References to Olympics Beijing 2008 in BBC and CNN online Table 6. Number of transitive and intransitive sentences in two sample texts Table 7. Active and passive voices used in BBC and CNN texts Table 8.
Passive clauses found in the BBC article “Beijing bids farewell to Olympics” Table 9. Passive clauses found in the CNN article “Grand spectacle closes Beijing’s Olympics” Table 10. Conjunctions used in BBC article “Beijing bids farewell to Olympics” Table 11. Conjunctions used in “Grand spectacle closes Beijing’s Olympics” of CNN Table 12.
Referring words/phrases used in BBC article “Beijing bids farewell to Olympics” Table 13. Referring words/phrases used in “Grand spectacle closes Beijing’s Olympics” of CNN Table 14. Analysis of transitivity used in BBC text Table 15. Analysis of transitivity used in CNN text Table 16: Summary of transitivity analysis data LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.
Rationale of the study The Beijing Olympics 2008, which took place from the 8th August to 24th August 2008 in China, is one of the most successful Olympic Games which won great approval from the media world. With a total of 11,468 athletes from 204 countries and regions, about 100,000 Olympic volunteers, 400,000 city volunteers, and 1 million social volunteers, Beijing saw the largest number of female athletes competing in the history of the Games. As the NBC Universal assesses, the Beijing Olympics is the most-watched U. television event of all time.
More than 220 television agencies and over 25,000 journalists covered the event. The IOC site logged 5 million clicks during the entire process of the Beijing Games, whereas it logged 2.8 million clicks during the Athens Olympics. More than 80 heads of states and governments participated in the opening ceremony of the Beijing Games. About 80 percent of the people in China and about half of the people in the United States and Europe watched the opening ceremony on television.
This was a record number. Few other events have received so much attention. The closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympics received wide coverage by most U. media outlets, with many praising the Games as the most memorable summer Olympics.
It was described as "the most memorable Olympics ever." In a piece titled "Truly exceptional Games," NBC said the Beijing Olympics made history "in virtually every regard. media outlets heaped praises on the Chinese volunteers at the Beijing Games; the Los Angeles Times praised the Chinese volunteers for their friendliness and efficiency. BBC (The British Broadcasting Corporation) and CNN (Cable News Network) are the world's largest broadcasters which are very familiar with English users. BBC has bases or correspondents in more than 200 countries and, as officially surveyed, is available to more than 274 million households, though also possibly far more individual persons and groups than surveys can gather, and it is the oldest surviving entity of its kind and is more widely known internationally than any other news organization.
As of June 2008, CNN is available in over 93 million U. Broadcast coverage extends to over 890,000 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 2 American hotel rooms, and the U.S broadcast is also shown in Canada. Globally, CNN programming airs through CNN International, which can be seen by viewers in over 212 countries and territories. While According to Alexa's Traffic Rank system, in July 2008 BBC Online was the 27th most popular English Language website in the world, and the 46th most popular overall, CNN.com is now one of the most popular news websites in the world.
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) has made the study of language into an interdisciplinary tool. A great number of researchers with various backgrounds, including media criticism use it. Most significantly, it offers the opportunity to adopt a social perspective in the cross-cultural study of media texts. While most forms of discourse analysis "aim to provide a better understanding of socio-cultural aspects of texts," CDA "aims to provide accounts of the production, internal structure, and overall organization of texts." One crucial difference is that CDA "aims to provide a critical dimension in its theoretical and descriptive accounts of texts." With all above reasons, the author has the temptation to carry out a study named: ―A Critical Discourse Analysis of CNN Online and BBC Online News on Beijing Olympics 2008‖.
Aims and objectives of the study The study aims at: - Providing an analysis of CNN Online and BBC Online News on Beijing Olympics 2008 in the light of Critical Discourse Analysis; - Giving an illustration of CDA approach; - Raising language users as well as newspaper readers‘ awareness of the power and ideology of discourses. Scope of the study In critically analyzing CNN and BBC News on Beijing Olympics 2008, the author concentrates only on the coverage in the CNN and BBC online, not the other kinds like printed or radio news. Specifically, in this study, the writer particularly examines the content and presentation of the articles, the use of word, grammar (transitive and LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 3 intransitive sentences as well as active and passive voices). Besides, some cohesive devices like conjunction and reference and transitivity are also factors of concerns in the thesis.
Methods of the study In order to obtain the aims of the study, the following activities will be carried out: In the first place, a literature review will be carried out to provide a theoretical background for the study. Then, a number of articles on BBC online and CNN online about Beijing Olympics will be analyzed in the light of critical discourse analysis. The research method applied in this part is both quantitative and qualitative. The analysis will be made in terms of the content and presentation.
Apart from that, vocabulary, syntactic structure and cohesion are also analyzed. From the analysis, a comparison between the news reported in the two newspapers will be interpreted and analyzed. Design of the study The thesis is divided into 4 chapters: Chapter I is the Introduction which provides the rationale, the aims, the methods and the design of the study. Chapter II naming Theoretical background first gives an overview of Critical Discourse Analysis.
In this part, the history of CDA and some aspects such as critical, ideology and power are mentioned and analyzed. Then, it deals with media discourse studies and systematic functional grammar. Chapter III is entitled A Critical Discourse Analysis of CNN Online and BBC Online News on Beijing Olympics 2008. This is the main focus of the thesis which provides and discusses the main findings of the study.
Chapter IV is the Conclusion summarizing the main findings of the study, drawing important conclusions and offers suggestions for further research. Apart from these main parts, appendices and references are also included. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 4 Chapter II. Critical Discourse Analysis 2.
What is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)? Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context. With such dissident research, critical discourse analysts take explicit position, and thus want to understand, expose, and ultimately resist social inequality. Some of the tenets of CDA can already be found in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School before the Second World War (Agger 1992b). Its current focus on language and discourse was initiated with the "critical linguistics" that emerged (mostly in the UK and Australia) at the end of the 1970s (Fowler et al.
CDA has also counterparts in "critical" developments in sociolinguistics, psychology, and the social sciences, some already dating back to the early 1970s. As is the case in these neighboring disciplines, CDA may be seen as a reaction against the dominant formal (often "asocial" or "uncritical") paradigms of the 1960s and 1970s. CDA is not so much a direction, school, or specialization next to the many other "approaches" in discourse studies. Rather, it aims to offer a different "mode" or "perspective" of theorizing, analysis, and application throughout the whole field.
We may find a more or less critical perspective in such diverse areas as pragmatics, conversation analysis, narrative analysis, rhetoric, stylistics, sociolinguistics, ethnography, or media analysis, among others. Crucial for critical discourse analysts is the explicit awareness of their role in society. Continuing a tradition that rejects the possibility of a "value-free" science, they argue that science, and especially scholarly discourse, are inherently part of and influenced by social structure, and produced in social interaction. Instead of denying or ignoring such a relation between scholarship and society, they plead that such relations be studied and accounted for in their own right, and that scholarly practices be based on such insights.
Theory formation, description, and explanation, also in discourse analysis, are socio-politically "situated," whether we like it or not. Reflection on the role of scholars in society and the polity thus becomes an inherent part of the discourse analytical enterprise. This may mean, LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 5 among other things, which discourse analysts conduct researches in solidarity and cooperation with dominated groups. The history of CDA In the late 1970s, Critical Linguistics (CL) was developed by a group of linguists and literary theorists at the University of East Anglia (Fowler et.
Their approach was based on Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). CL practitioners such as Trew (1979a, p. 155) aimed at "isolating ideology in discourse" and showing "how ideology and ideological processes are manifested as systems of linguistic characteristics and processes." This aim was pursued by developing CL's analytical tools (Fowler et al., 1979; Fowler, 1991) based on SFL. Following Halliday, these CL practitioners view language in use as simultaneously performing three functions: ideational, interpersonal, and textual functions.
According to Fowler (1991, p. 25), whereas the ideational function refers to the experience of the speakers of the world and its phenomena, the interpersonal function embodies the insertion of speakers' own attitudes and evaluations about the phenomena in question, and establishing a relationship between speakers and listeners. Instrumental to these two functions is the textual function. It is through the textual function of language that speakers are able to produce texts that are understood by listeners.