Multimodal Cognitive Critical Analysis of Mainstream British Media on COVID-19

From the perspective of Multimodal Cognitive Discourse Analysis, this study, based on social semiotics theory, has constructed a cognitive functional analysis method to analyze the reports of mainstream British media on COVID-19, revealed their characteristics in terms of narrative modes and discourse strategies from three aspects of multimodal uses, ideological orientation and audience characteristics, and conducted an objective analysis of the international image of China that mainstream British media tried to shape, which aims to provide references for the construction of China's international discourse and the image of an international power. Keywords— Audience characteristics, Comparative analysis and criticism, COVID-19, Multimodal cognitive discourse analysis, Mainstream British media.


INTRODUCTION
In recent years, current political news, as a primary platform for young people to know about national policies, has been playing a significant role in shaping perceptions Modality can be understood as a symbol system that is interpreted by specific perception processes. Combining modality and five human senses, it can be divided into (1) image or visual modality; (2) auditory or acoustic modality; (3) olfactory modality; (4) taste modality and (5) tactile modality. The significance of multimodal discourse analysis is that it integrates language and other related meaning resources, which makes us understand the role of language system and effects of other symbol systems, such as image, music and color, in the process of meaning exchanges so that the interpretation of discourse meaning can be more extensive and accurate.

Multimodal Cognitive Critical Analysis
The concepts of multimodal cognitive critical analysis proposed by Pan Yanyan in 2019 mainly include social-cultural context, generic features, comparative analysis and criticism.
Metaphor and metonymy belong to the cognitive field, while the news is just a kind of product of perception based on certain recognition of the audience and reader.
They are closely related to cognitive narration. In order to convey a great deal of information and opinion of values contained in the news to audiences who lack social cognition, narrative methods of metaphor and metonymy are applied to arouse the sensory cognition of audiencesby using various modalities in the news so as to help them to understand the real world so that they can better understand the society and communicate with others.

MAINSTREAM BRITISH MEDIA
In order to make the research more extensive, Reuters, an official news agency, BBC, the most famous radio and television in the UK, and the Guardian, a comprehensive national daily newspaper in Britain, are selected as resources to be analyzed.

Social and Cultural Context
Pan Yanyan pointed out that social and cultural context includes material factors and non-material factors.

Generic Features
TV news satisfies people's needs in psychology that seeing is believing. It usually gives priority to introduction and explanation, trying to offer the audience a comprehensive, systematic and clear visual presentation.
Its characteristics of realistic genre also determine that TV news is sometimes based on metaphor and metonymy, which is easy for audiences to identify and understand.
In a report entitled "Wuhan Hospitals under Pressure

Comparative Analysis and Criticism
"Criticism" here is not to expose the negative meaning in the text, but to reveal the power relations and ideology from the phenomena that are hard to be discovered or even havealready been accepted by people through comparative

Multimodal Application
We take a BBC's report "China Struggles to Contain Virus" as an example. The video lasts 8 minutes and 26 seconds, and the report on China makes up 3 minutes and 35 seconds.

Language Modality
From the perspective of language modality, the reporter's speech was relatively subjective. As a reporter of a well-known broadcasting company, he even mentioned unverified information in his report. Qiushi, a notorious anti-government figure, all of these images intentionally create an atmosphere in which Chinese government seems to be losing the support of masses, which is easy to mislead foreign readers and audiences.

Expression Modality
In this video, the reporter showed his face. The river beach where Li Wenliang were mourned should have been solemn. However, the BBC reporter's statement was relaxed and casual, which lacked the basic respect for the deceased.

The Orientation of the Host's Discourse Power to the Program
As the core of TV programs, a host plays a direct role in guiding and influencing TV programs, and the same is reported. From the above speeches the host reported, we could see that the host's report is neutral.

The Orientation of the Director to the Scenes in the Program
Through the presentation and arrangement of TV

Programs
The orientation of pictures and sound effects to the program was clearly shown in the video that the voice of resistance and struggle was improved when the video was broadcasting, which would arouse the audience's strong Multimodal cognitive critical analysis is an interdisciplinary research direction. In the process of research, it combines some theories of news cultural research and media reports so as to make in-depth interpretation and criticism of the mainstream media in Britain. However, such discourse analyses, mainly applying qualitative research, are inevitably subjective to a certain extent, which needs further researches.

This work was supported by the COVID-19 Epidemic
Emergency Research of Yangtze University.