Browsing by Author "Honkavaara, Sanni"

This thesis explores press bias in the US and UK news coverage of the final 2020 US presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. An integral part of the US presidential election campaigns, the debates are televised events where the presidential candidates discuss controversial topics, and the press reports about the debates in real time. The goal of this thesis is to analyse whether a bias towards one of the candidates can be identified in the press coverage, and whether there is a difference between the coverage in the two countries. While the topic of press bias in elections has evoked academic interest in other fields, linguistic research has been minimal. Previous studies have found that the press coverage of presidential debates is sometimes biased or inaccurate, which might have the potential to influence voter behaviour. In this thesis I analyse whether a linguistic approach can offer new insight on how these biases manifest. The data comes from 8 US and 10 UK newspapers and consists of 69 newspaper articles. These countries were chosen, because their media systems have been found to share many similarities in the past, and they can give a general idea of the press coverage in the English-speaking world. More than just bias, this study analyses something called evaluation, an area of linguistics that deals with how writers express their views, how they build discourse with the readers and how they reflect the values of their community. Appraisal Framework (Martin and White, 2005) was used in the analysis, as it has been specifically designed for analysing evaluation and has been applauded for its ability to recognise implicit attitudes of the writers. The framework consists of three categories: ATTITUDES of the writer, ENGAGEMENT with the reader and GRADUATION, the degree of the attitudes. The collected data was analysed and classified manually in a close reading. The differences between the countries were found to be small, and a consistent bias favouring Biden was identified in the press coverage of both countries. In the ATTITUDE category, Trump was more often evaluated negatively than positively in both countries, especially regarding his moral standing (PROPRIETY) and his skills and capabilities (CAPACITY). Biden, on the other hand, was not evaluated negatively as much as Trump, and in the US, there were more positive than negative evaluations of him. He was most often applauded for his successes in the debate (CAPACITY). ENGAGEMENT was most often used by the journalists to oppose Trump’s views and to support Biden’s. The framework made it possible to build a more detailed description of how the biases manifest in the presidential debate news coverage and especially excelled in recognising implicit attitudes. At the same time, the framework had some issues regarding replicability of the study due to the subjectivity in identifying implicit attitudes. Some of these issues have been brought up by researchers in the past and adjustments for the framework have been suggested. Future studies using the Appraisal Framework could benefit from using one of these adjustments and seeing how that affects the results.