Chapter 3 Research Method
3.3 Discourse Analysis
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asked to take greater responsibility for the macroeconomic stability and follow the
international monetary rule. This thesis assumes that the two Chinese international
news channels, CNC World and CCTV 9, when reporting the two issues, will show more
discrepancies with the Western channel, CNN International. Further, for the other five
news topics, according to the Library of US Congress Studies (2004), Chinese leaders tend
to view China as an integrator of the Third World, and China has involved in the foreign
affairs of the developing countries by military or peaceful means such as trade favors or
joint ventures. China has a near-alliance with the Islamic and Arabic countries, and
inclines to show sympathy toward the Palestine statehood in UN and support to the
regimes of Egypt and Libya. In such topics, there might be differences existing among
the three channels. As to the financial crisis in Europe and the Killing of bin Laden,
which are highly relevant to the Western hegemonies but peripheral to China, this thesis
assumes that the coverage of these two issues will reveal more accordance among the
three chose channels.
3.3 Discourse Analysis
Discourse, deemed as the bridge linking the society and cognition, has been approached by various disciplines, including linguistics, psychology and
sociology (Brown; & Yule, 1989; Dijk, 1983). According to Alexander et al. (1987), language use, verbal interaction, and communication belong to the micro-level of
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the social order, while power, dominance and hegemony are terms that belong to macro-level analysis. The purpose of discourse analysis is to bridge the gap between micro and macro approaches. In 1970s, the study of “texts” or
“discourses” has benefited from linguistics, semiotics, psychology sociology and anthropology. Communication, as social science, places its emphasis of discourse analysis on the language use in a communicative act or piece. It is to examine the structure of social interaction manifested in conversation and textual
descriptions which are results of the social context. According to Brown and Yule (1989), communication is a process of relentless information producing and interpreting, it is people who are involved in the production of information, and hence the communicative discourse reflects the communicative context which people are in. Sociolinguist Labov (1972) elaborates:
the language system and language use are not autonomous but inextricably related to the interactional functions and the social context of communication;
language and discourse forms thus mark or indicated their relevant social parameters and are treated as manifestation of social action of a specific kind (p.54, 55).
Discourses, as can be seen, are integral parts of communicative acts in specific sociocultural situation rather than isolated linguistic objects.
Theorizing on discourse of news, Van Dijk (1983) has noted that news is not simply a description of the facts, but rather construction and reconstruction of reality which contain the norms and values of the society. News discourse
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consists of shared belief about a society. The three major players, news sources, journalist, and audience are linked to one another by the news discourse. When journalists are producing the news text, their selection of words might reveal the social forces that direct the piece in a particular direction. Those social forces mainly come from three aspects: (a) the guidance of professional working theories and organizational constraint; (b) rules, conventions, rituals and
structures of news discourse; and (c) anticipated audience interpretation (Gans, 1979; Tuckman, 1978). In other words, news text does not exist in vacuum but rather is a practice constructed by social and political forces. Dijk notes:
Media discourse should not be seen merely as a ready “product” of
news-gathering activities, but as the manifestation of a complex process in which knowledge, beliefs and opinions are matched with existing or incoming information about events, the social context of news production ,and
representation of the reading public (Dijk, 1983, p. 28).
News messages often contain traces of the current social context and hence in communication field, discourse analysis works as an effective research method to recognize the implicit ideologies of the present through the observation of the communicative discourse of news material.
A central belief in the work of discourse is that of power. Choices of words and how the issue is discussed in the news are not trivial matters (Pan & Kosicki, 1993). In fact, how the news is framed holds great power in determining what the agenda is for the context and providing the handy tool for discussion. Such
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power is not absolute or definitely obvious. Media are themselves a source of power resources. Gramsci (1996) coined the concept of “hegemony” to indicate that the control power is integrated in laws, social norms, habits, rules or general consensus and news uses symbolic devices to gain legitimacy and strive toward consensus. Analyzing news discourse is a way to analyzing the social power which attempted to control the mind and action of public through influencing their knowledge and opinion.
News frame is one of the key elements of news discourses. A frame is the constructed theme contained or implied in a news text. Although in the circular process of communication, the audience’s comprehension about a news
discourse varies, the indicated frame device has the ability of directing attention and focusing the perspectives available to audiences. Pan and Kosicki (1993) synthesized that there are four dimensions of the frame device: syntactical structure, script structure, thematic structure and rhetorical structure. Among the four devices, the syntactical structure is useful to evaluate the level of
“objectivity” which is the mainstream professional conventions in news, because the sentences as a unit of a news piece indicate the dominant power or
preference behind the scene, the analysis of syntactical structure includes examining the validity and facticity of quotes and citations, how the news
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presenting authority and official source and also the marginalization of certain points of view by relating a quote or point of view to a social deviant or
so(Hacket, 1984; Pan & Kosicki, 1993). Hence, to exercise discourse analysis, it is useful to employ the syntactical frame device if one intends to look into the level of objectivity. In other words, to perform discourse analysis, the target news texts should be first divided into practical frame units. Television news, as Reuven Frank, a former manager at NBC, suggests, is expected to hold the immediate interest of extensive audience, the form should be constructed in a very definite order, there is an explicit tempo of “a beginning, middle and end” (Epstein, 2000).
And Thompson further articulates the structure with more specific sub divisions, that is, television news consists of five main substances: headline, straight read of the presenter, voice pieces or interview clips, pictures and the commentary
(Thompson, 2010). These five substances together serve as the basic structure of television news discourse.
Television news summarizes the reality into a roughly three-minute flashing of images with audio aid. Each of the five major elements of Thompson’s TV news structure serves as a framing mechanism intending to guide the audience to perceive reality within the frame or frames constructed by visual and textual information. Adapting Thompson’s television news structure, the thesis will
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analyze news discourse of the chosen 7 issues on CNN, CNC World and CCTV-9, in terms of: (1) headline; (2) the first sentence of the straight read of the presenter;
(3) the source of interviewee or quotation or citation; (4) pictures and (5) the commentary. Headline, the first sentence of the oral reporting and commentary serve as summaries of the news which encapsulate the story (Thompson, 2010), the interview clips contains quotations and citations of the news source which have been filtered by the news editorial, and hence, who is interviewed or quoted implies the frame preference of the news channel. Besides, comparing with printed media, television news’ impact comes from the visual power, so what the news channels present the news with visual information is also the focus for analysis. But television news contains sequent takes of numerous pictures which defy quantification. However, the continuing images and the text information on the screen do not function separately, they are either complementary or
irrelevant. Since the headline text represents the theme of the news or the preferred reading of the news, the running images should be presented and narrated in such a way to coincide with the headline text. It is thus of interest and significance to see whether the running images resonate or contradict the
headline text. Helping to measure the implicit frames contained in the images projected on the screen, this technique can unearth information about the
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reporting by CNC World, CCTV 9 and CNN International in their respective
coverage of the chosen seven events of global impact and Chinese relevance. Such data, to be presented in the following chapter, form an important and integral part addressing the thesis’s research questions.
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Chapter 4 Findings
In total, 132 news clips of the chosen seven global issues during the study period are collected for analysis. As the archive data are sometimes incomplete, 8 news clips’ first read of the anchor of CNN International were missing. The body of these news items, however, remain available for analysis.
Overall, the quantity of the news items carried by each news channel on the selected events is rather varied with notable discrepancies (Table 1).
Table 1. Number of News Items on CNC World, CCTV 9 and CNN International
CNC