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A Critical Discourse Analysis on News Reports of "PRISM Scandal"from the Perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar

Author: YangYingJun
Tutor: ZhangWeiYou
School: Central China Normal University
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis news discourse PRISM ideology
CLC: G212
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2014
Downloads: 1
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Abstract


Critical Discourse Analysis aims to explore the relationship among language, power and ideology. News discourse, as a public media discourse, has always been the focus of CDA. Generally, news reports are considered as unbiased and objective coverage of "hard facts". But actually, there are hidden values and ideologies behind the paraphrasing and selection of information in the reporting. Such kind of ideology can be dug out be means of CDA.This study focuses on the big event of2013-the PRISM Scandal. The PRISM Scandal dates back in June2013, when former CIA officer Edward Snowden sent two top-secret documents to the American newspaper Washington Post. The documents disclose that the U.S. National Security Agency has a secret project with the code name of "PRISM", which requires telecom giant Verizon Company to hand over the phone records of millions of users every day. Those materials also show that in the past six years, NSA and the FBI, by entering Microsoft, Google, Apple, Yahoo and other Internet servers, monitor the e-mails, chats, videos, photographs and other confidential information of U.S. citizens,. For a time, such incident sets off a firestorm in the world, and the cyber-security issue has become the focus of world attention.92related news reports are collected from the website of Washington Post to be the news data for the research. The coverage starts from June,2013to January,2014, which lasts about seven months.Then quantitative and qualitative approaches are employed in data analysis with Fairclough’s three-dimensional model as the theoretical foundation and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as the analytic tool. These two theories combined form the theoretical framework of this research. The headlines of the92news reports are analyzed especially in terms of transitivity, news source and modes of representation. Then two sample news reports are selected from the news data to present two side’s views towards this event. Sample report A stands for the attitude of Booz Allen company where Snowden used to work. Sample report B stands for the officials’position. It is found in the analytic results that the company which Snowden used to work for denies its relation with Snowden. And the officials who represent the government argue that their action of collecting personal information is for the sake of protecting its citizens from terrorism. Such analytic results suggest the hidden ideology behind language. It is indicated that U.S. still sticks to its power politics and bears the ambition to control the whole world and it seeks to hold the power of speech and stand in the highest position as long as possible even if its citizens’rights may be infringed.

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CLC: > Culture, science,education, sports > Information and knowledge dissemination > Journalism,journalism > Press interviews and reports
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