Discursive Constructions Around Terrorism in the People's Daily (China) and the Sun (UK) Before and After 9.11

How have media constructions around terrorism changed since 9.11? This book analyses the ways that language is employed in the media to reference discourses around terrorism in different social systems and doctrines, and illustrates the ways in which news reporting around terrorism is filtered according to a wide range of phenomena including national interests, the goals of those who run the press, international relations, methods of news production, audience targeting and other historical, political and social factors.
This book collects and analyses corpora from news articles in the two most widely read newspapers in China and the UK. Corpus techniques including frequency and keyness are merged with methods associated with critical discourse analysis particularly investigation of social context. This book shows that there is a wide range of possible discursive constructions of terrorism in the media. Such different perspectives are likely to shape national or even global opinion on how to tackle terrorism.

Yufang Qian is a graduate of Zhejiang Normal University (BA, 1986), the University of Bucharest (MA, 2002) and the University of Lancaster (Ph.D., 2008). She is an Associate Professor and Head of the Media Discourse Study Centre at Zhejiang University of Media and Communications. Her recent publications include articles on corpus-based media discourse analysis.