A Critical Discourse Analysis of Reports about China on the COVID-19 Pandemic in The New York Times

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is a hot topic in 2020. Through the critical discourse analysis of related reports about the pandemic in China in The New York Times, ideology in media behind the news reports and China’s image can be revealed. Based on Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework, combined with the methods of quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis and corpus analysis, and with the help of the corpus analysis software AntConc, this thesis makes an in-depth analysis of 35 news reports in The New York Times from September to December of 2020 from three dimensions: description, interpretation and explanation. The description level analyzes the text according to keywords and concordance lines; the interpretation level analyzes from the perspective of news sources and reporting modes; and the explanation level analyzes from the aspects of institutional context and societal context. Through the thorough analysis of the news reports, the thesis finds that The New York Times compliments China’s outcome of fighting against COVID-19, but doesn’t fully agree with the measures. Besides, The New York Times puts China on the opposite side of the United States and other western countries, and it regards China as a threatening and autocratic country to a certain extent. This thesis is of avail not only to contribute to researches in the field of CDA, especially investigations of news reports based on corpus, but also is useful for readers to understand news reports objectively when they read news coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic about China, and then to objectively view the construction of China’s image in foreign mainstream media.