Critical Discourse Analysis of People’s Daily and the New York Times’ Headlines on the Beijing Winter Olympics

Abstract

This paper examined the headlines of the Chinese newspaper, People’s Daily, and the American newspaper, the New York Times, about the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022. To investigate the possible ideological biases of news headlines, this paper performs corpus-based critical discourse analysis. It hypothesizes that Chinese media will use positive strategies to report the event, whereas American media will maintain a neutral stance. Fairclough’s three-dimensional analysis model and sentiment analysis tools via Google apps were applied to analyze news headlines of the two newspapers. With “Beijing Winter Olympics” as the keyword, People’s Daily generated 261 results and a sentiment score of 60.2 whereas the New York Times produced 235 results and a sentiment score of 0.1 from February 3 to 20, 2022. The analysis reveals that People’s Daily predominantly uses positive language and active voice, frequently quoting authoritative figures to reinforce the success and international approval of the Beijing Winter Olympics. Notable features include a high frequency of positive words, reinforce China’s high-power position in the sentence structure. Conversely, the New York Times presents a more balanced perspective, with both positive and negative sentiments. It often employs passive voice and indirect language to highlight controversies and challenges, such as human rights issues and the political implications of the Games. The New York Times’ headlines also exhibit the use of metaphors and euphemisms to subtly convey skepticism about China’s intentions. The conclusion of this study is that People’s Daily is committed to establishing and maintaining the image of a strong and capable Chinese government, while the New York Times, although striving for journalistic objectivity, still exposes ideological differences towards China, which also reflects the geopolitical tensions between China and the United States.