The major goal of critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis is to make explicit the underlying ideologies of seemingly neutral and objective language. The analysis of language and ideology has significantly contributed to various social studies, including sexual discrimination (Fairclough 1992, Fowler 1991, Caldas-Coulthard 1993), racism (Achugar 2004, Erjavec 2001, Fairclough 1995, Flowerdew et al. 2002, Fowler et al. 1979, Richardson 2004, Teo 2000, Thetela 2001, van Dijk 1991), and political science (Fairclough 1989, Fang 1994, 2001, Fowler 1991, Fowler et al. 1979, Kuo 2001, 2007, Kuo and Nakamura 2005, Lee and Craig
1992, Wang 1993). This thesis aims to examine how language signals the underlying political stances of four TV news stations in Taiwan. In what follows, critical studies on political inclinations are introduced, with westerns studies first, followed by China- and Taiwan-related studies.
Apart from the analysis of the Salisbury riot discussed in Section 2.2.1.1, Trew (1979b) examined how two British newspapers, the Sun and the Morning Star, reported the 1977 Notting Hill Carnival, in which black youths confronted the police.
Through the analysis of transitivity and characterizing expressions used in the news, it was found that as a tabloid which benefited from capitalism, the Sun was hostile to the
‘black’. On the contrary, being an official organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain, the Star sympathized with the ‘youths’, who were deprived by the society and in need of help instead of punishment.
Also on British newspapers, Fowler (1991) studied how they responded to the bombing of Libya by the US with the help of the UK on April 15, 1986. The Guardian condemned the action, and remained neutrality by using names or formal titles to refer to principals involved. In contrast, the Sun was ecstatic over the bombing and extensively employed evaluative terms, such as ‘Rambo’ for then US President Reagan, ‘Maggie’ for then UK Premier Thatcher, and ‘mad dog’ to then Libya Colonel Gaddafi. These all served as substantial clues to the Sun’s position in the tension between the US/UK and Libya.
On the other side of the Atlantic, language and its ideological properties also attracted considerable attention in the US. Herman and Chomsky (1988) proposed the propaganda model to explain the performance of the US press. As so-called gatekeepers, the press uses a set of filters5 to sift out events that comport with its
5 Herman and Chomsky (1988) brought out five filters. First, size, ownership, and profit orientation of the mass media; second, the advertising license to do business; third, sourcing mass-media news; forth, flak and the enforcers; fifth, anticommunism as a control mechanism.
ideologies as news reports. To defend capitalism, the very root of western values and media, the anti-communism fervor makes victims in a communist country ‘worthy’, while those in friend countries ‘unworthy’. The consequence is that disturbances in an enemy country stand a greater chance of becoming headline stories than those in an ally, which are likely to be marginalized or even concealed. The discriminatory treatments constitute the ‘us versus them’ dichotomy. The press acts in propaganda to pursue and defend its own interests and its language can be best understood if it is analyzed in this propaganda model.
In illustrating the propaganda model, Lee and Craig (1992) analyzed the US reports on labor strikes in South Korea and Poland during 1980s. The content analysis showed that more reports, longer length and more prominence were dedicated to strikes in Poland than those in South Korean. In the critical discourse analysis, it was found that the strike in South Korea was considered a wage dispute, in which the government performed as a successful mediator. Nevertheless, the strike in Poland was portrayed as a political dissidence, a challenge to the communism and a demand for freedom, and the communist government was discredited to be weak and indecisive.
In addition to research on the western media, studies targeting at the China’s and Taiwanese press are also fruitful. Wang (1993) compared the Chinese Communist Party newspaper, Renmin Ribao ‘the People’s Daily’, with the New York Times in their coverage of the 1991 Soviet coup. In the content analysis, it was found that the Times devoted a lot more news items than Ribao to the coup, yet with similar percentages of front-page stories.
In the critical discourse analysis, according to the macrostructures, the Times report was exhaustive in content and multi-angled in structure, while the Ribao report was comparatively incomplete. In the micro-level, the Times gave more prominence
to reformers Yeltsin and Gorbachev, contrary to Ribao’s attention to hardline Yanayev.
What’s more interesting is that Ribao never referred to the event as a ‘coup’, but as a
‘power transfer’. The implicit but systematic linguistic differences between the Times and Ribao suggested their opposing positions to the 1991 Soviet ‘coup’.
Another study on Renmin Ribao is Fang (1994), in which critical linguistics was adopted to examine how the ‘us versus them’ dichotomy influenced its coverage of civil unrest in foreign countries. Results showed that different labels and accounts were given to different countries according to the dichotomy. Thus, unrest in ‘us’
countries was baoluan/saoluan ‘a riot’, and the rioters should bear the bitter consequences of their irrational behaviors. Nevertheless, unrest in ‘them’ countries was shiwei ‘a demonstration’ and shiwei youxing ‘a march’, in which the people had the rights to voice themselves, and the authority was to blame.
Years later, Fang (2001) adopted critical discourse analysis in studying Renmin Ribao (RR) and the Taiwanese newspaper Central Daily News (the CDN). The two newspapers reports on civil unrest in South Africa and Argentina were analyzed.
Argentina established amicable relations with both Taiwan and China, but South Africa maintained friendly relations with Taiwan, but not with China.
In the South African reports, two opposing scripts were employed by RR and the CDN to account for the outbreak of the conflict. For RR, it was a ‘racial struggle’ in which the black were victims; to the CDN, however, it was a ‘law and order’ crisis in need of riot control actions. Moreover, it was found that events against the newspaper’s perspectives were marginalized or omitted in the reports. Therefore, RR did not cover the incident that black officers were also under attack, whereas the CDN used it as evidence to support its ‘law and order’ frame. Nevertheless, the CDN downplayed the event that the police opened fire on unarmed mourners.
On the other hand, the two newspapers reports on the Argentina ‘riots’ were
much alike. Fang made it evident that the contrastive treatments of civil unrest in South Africa and Argentina by RR and the CDN were not coincidences, but reflections of the foreign policies of the governments.
The tension between China and Taiwan can be further detected in Kuo (2001), in which a Chinese newspaper article was examined. The study demonstrated how various linguistic devices, such as evaluative expressions and ‘China is the mother (of Taiwan)’ metaphor, were employed to defend the ‘One China’ policy of the China government.
Kuo later worked with Nakamura and focused on the political environment in Taiwan (Kuo and Nakamura 2005). Two politically opposing newspapers were studied, the United Daily News and the Liberty Times. The former was said to lean towards the KMT, whereas the latter sided with the DPP. The news report was on the visit of then first lady, Wu Shu-chen, who was a symbolic feature of the DPP, to the US in September 2002.
Both newspapers’ reports were translated from an English news story appearing in the China Post. Nevertheless, the comparison of the two translated versions with the original story showed that transformations, syntactic variations, and lexical changes had been made to serve the specific political orientations of the two newspapers. The quantitative analysis also demonstrated that the Liberty Times, as expected, devoted more space, more prominence, and more positive comments to Wu’s visit than the United Daily News.
This chapter has reviewed how content analysis and critical discourse analysis have been adopted by scholars in the west and the east to expose news organizations’
hidden ideologies underneath their supposedly neutral coverage and language.
However, most of the studies are dedicated to newspapers. In addition, the news schema proposed by van Dijk has long be neglected expect in Wang’s 1993 study.
Thus the present study aims to fill the gap by investigating four TV news stations in Taiwan with both content analysis and critical discourse analysis. Not only linguistic features, but also macrostructures of reports are under critical examination.
C
HAPTERT
HREEM
ETHODOLOGYThis chapter presents the methodology of the present study. Section 3.1 addresses data collection about how the TV news stations were selected. Section 3.2 familiarizes presentation formats of TV news. Section 3.3 deals with data analysis.
Political news first identified and then will undergo both content analysis (in Chapter 4) and critical discourse analysis (in Chapter 5) to reveal the relations between underlying political stances of news stations and their political reports.