A Cognitive Study of News Reports of China Daily and Washington Post on Diaoyu Island Issues

Abstract

Diaoyu islands issue has become the hot topic since 2012. China Daily and Washington Post are chosen as research subject, who are representative news agencies with great authority of two countries representing their countries' and people's attitude. The author chose 8 news reports respectively from the two news agencies over Diaoyu island issue, combining political news and conceptual metaphor, finding out the similarities and differences in the use of conceptual metaphor of these two news agencies based on mapping mechanism, and revealing their attitude and political stance over the Diaoyu islands issue. It has been found that there are some metaphors commonly used by two news agencies, while some metaphors are preferred. Besides, China holds unshakable political stance in protecting its own territory rights. America's attitude over the island dispute between China and Japan is constantly changing. topology of the source domain, in a way consistent with the inherent structure of the target domain. This paper applies conceptual metaphor theory to compare 8 pieces of news reports respectively from China Daily and Washington Post. Those two news agencies represent the different voices towards the international political events, cultural conflicts and economic activities from the two countries, China and USA. They are two of the most popular international news agencies, which convey the information to people and lead or at least influence people's opinion on things. Also, it demonstrates the two countries' different foreign policy, political attitude, and cultural elements. All the news reports from China Daily and Washington Post that concerned in this thesis are found respectively from the website http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/ and http://www.washingtonpost.com/.