U.S.-based Chinese diasporic media and "social myth": A comparative critical discourse analysis

Emanating from the notion of "social myth" that Frazier put forward in his ethnographic research on the black community in the United States, this paper seeks to capture the U.S.-based Chinese diasporic media's "re-coding" of news events. By comparing the reports from a Chinese diasporic newspaper and its mainstream counterpart USA Today about Obama hosting a naturalization ceremony, the paper uncovers and accounts for their major narrative differences, and thereby reveals the Chinese diasporic media's representations of American government and Chinese immigrants that constitute a larger picture of a "social myth". The paper employs critical discourse analysis by Fairclough as a major analytical tool, while drawing on methodologies from Halliday's systemic functional linguistics. In this way, it attempts to shed light on how Chinese diasporic media actively mediate between the ethnic minority and centres of powers in mainstream society.