Hedges express caution, tentativeness and possibility in communication. Hedges can be categorized into three types, i.e. semantic, grammatical and pragmatic. Hedging devices are varied and difficult to distinguish from their literal meanings, so the distinction and interpretation of hedges must be undertaken in certain contexts. Functions of hedging from the pragmatic perspective have been one of the most frequently discussed subjects at home and abroad.Hedges abound in English broadcasting news. This study attempts to find different features of hedging between the two sub-genres, hard news and soft news, of English broadcasting, as well as American broadcasting news and British broadcasting news. Four corpora of English broadcasting news are randomly selected from VOA and BBC respectively. Adopting the categorization of hedging proposed by Salager Meyer, this paper makes a contrastive analysis of the distribution of hedging in VOA and BBC. Some interesting findings have been made in the comparison.The hedging devices principally employed in the corpora are approximators and shields, which differ in the distribution of hard news and soft news of English broadcasting news. There are many more hedges used in soft news of VOA and BBC than that in hard news. And in the soft news, both approximators and shields have larger number. American broadcasting news and British broadcasting news have almost the same number of hedges, though VOA has more approximators and less shields. Hedging devices achieve an effective realization of cautious attitude, thus fulfilling the function of author’s subjective choice rather than the widely-recognized impression of neutrality and objectivity. The functions of hedging in English broadcasting news mainly include four points: seeking accuracy; conforming with the audiences’ way of understanding; avoiding absoluteness; and protecting reporters and people concerned.