1 Introduction

In 2020, when the COVID-19 broke out, China quickly took preventive and control measures and disclosed information to the international community through mainstream media. News value is an important research object in the field of news communication, but existing research ignores linguistic perspectives and cannot explain how news value is constructed in news discourse. Bednarek and Caple proposed the discourse view of news value, believing that news value is the value reconstructed by journalists through news discourse. They summarized 11 types of news value and constructed corresponding language and visual resource catalogs, building a multimodal discourse analysis framework. As an authoritative newspaper in China, this study uses corpus assisted multimodal discourse analysis to investigate what news values, means and purposes have been constructed in China Daily's news reports on the COVID-19.

2 Literature Review

Research on the value of news both domestically and internationally mainly revolves around aspects such as definition, elements, selection, evaluation, and evolution. There are five representative viewpoints in China: quality theory, standard theory, function theory, effect theory, and relationship theory. Internationally, it is divided into social view, cognitive view, and material view. The constituent elements of news value include timeliness, importance, proximity, salience, and interestingness. American scholar Shoemaker believes that media content is the construction of society, which is consistent with Bednarek and Caple's discourse construction of news values. Images also play an important role in conveying news information, but domestic research mostly focuses on text and neglects the role of images. The research on news reports related to COVID-19 involves the image of characters, communication strategies, reporting characteristics and other aspects, but lacks the research from the perspective of news value theory. This study is based on the China Daily corpus and uses multimodal analysis methods to explore the construction methods, purposes, and modal combination relationships between text and images of news value in news reporting.

3 Research Design

Introduced the research design, including corpus construction, analysis tool selection, research questions, and research steps. The researchers collected news reports and illustrations about the COVID-19 from January to February 2020 from the official website of China Daily, and built a multimodal corpus containing 126 effective news stories and 101 news images through keyword search, data screening and sorting. The study used AntConc 3.5.9w software for corpus retrieval and analysis. The research focuses on the construction, means, and functions of news value in China Daily's epidemic reporting. The research steps include generating high-frequency word lists and keyword lists, using KWIC function to analyze index rows, viewing the original text to expand contextual analysis language means and purpose functions, and manually qualitatively analyzing the news value in news images.

4 Results and Analysis

The AntConc 3.5.9w software was used to analyze the word list of the COVID-19 report. It was found that the high-frequency words were mainly nouns, such as China, Coronavirus, Epidemic, etc. The verbs were mostly auxiliary verbs and BE verbs, and there were fewer adjectives and pronouns. High frequency words show that news topics focus on COVID-19, especially in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. China Daily emphasizes the importance of the people and uses positive expressions to convey the determination and confidence to overcome the virus. Keyword analysis shows that the corpus mainly constructs four types of news values: proximity, elitism, negativity, and timeliness.

5 Conclusion

This chapter uses multimodal discourse analysis to study the news reporting of China Daily during the peak of the epidemic, revealing its four constructed news values: proximity, elitism, timeliness, and negativity. The report timely reported the epidemic by mentioning place names such as China and Wuhan, showcasing China's international image. Quoting the words of authoritative institutions and individuals enhances the authority and scientificity of news. The use of verb tenses reflects timeliness and constructs a positive image of the government. The use of epidemic vocabulary and battle vocabulary, although constructing negativity, enhances national cohesion. The news images and cartoon images respectively showcase the government's leadership, spirit of cooperation, and anti epidemic measures, as well as the spirit of "unity and solidarity" in the fight against the epidemic. The research method provides reference for future research on news value.