News reports about the Sino-US trade war: An ecolinguistic approach

Abstract

This study adopts an ecolinguistic approach to analyze logical resources in the news reports about the Sino-US trade war collected from the two sources, The Times of Britain and Sputnik News Agency of Russia. By observing the logical system for ecological discourse analysis, the study throws light on the ecological properties and values of the mainstream media between the two stakeholders. The discursive research finds that overall, the Russian news reports appeal for a free trade system, while they talk down the trade truce, and the British news reports, although opposed to protectionism, call for unity with the UK’s ally to avoid tariff risk and earn effortless profits. Hence, the ecological properties of the Russian and British media are complex and mixed. Regarding ecological variance, the two media more or less underwent an ecological shift with the dynamic process of the trade war.