A Study of News Discourse from the Perspective of Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Model

The coronavirus spreads at a horrendous speed and has influenced people’s lives. Based on Fairclough’s threedimensional model, this paper, with quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis, chooses thirty texts from The New York Times and then dissects them by means of the corpus AntConc 3.5.8 and manual collection from three angles including text, discursive practice and social practice. It is found that in the dimension of text, high-frequency words demonstrate the severe status quo of the epidemic, while words with emotional meanings show reporters’ critical views. In the dimension of discursive practice, Indirect speech as a preponderant reporting mode shows that subjective moods exist in news reports. In the dimension of social practice, five mainstream values deeply rooted in American people’s minds influence their attitudes towards the epidemic. This paper reveals the relationship between language and society in news reports on the Covid-19 epidemic, promoting the process of researches on critical discourse analysis of news reports on public health events.