Browsing by Subject "Donald Trump"

This thesis examines the evaluation of Donald Trump, the former U.S. president, in news discourse during his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. The polarizing reactions on the media-mogul-turned-politician in news media display attitudes on the candidate during both elections. This thesis attempts to analyze how these attitudes come across as evaluative language in news articles from outlets located on different sides of the political scale. Previous linguistics research into discourse in relation to Donald Trump has heavily focused on analyzing the language of Trump himself, as opposed to language about him. This study will attempt to fill that gap by focusing on evaluative language on Donald Trump. By utilizing perceived media bias from two organization, Ad Fontes Media and AllSides, Washington Examiner and the Washington Post were selected as the right-wing and left-wing outlets, respectively. The outlets were selected due to similarities in bias, the focus on politics, and the focus on “hard” news reporting. A total of 100 articles, 25 from both outlets from both campaign periods, were sampled from the ProQuest internet database into their respective corpora. In the approach to evaluative language, the theory chosen for the analysis was the Appraisal framework (Martin and White 2005). Utilized in several studies on news discourse in the past, the framework consists of different categories along which evaluative language can be assessed. The system that was utilized in this study was that of ATTITUDE, which focuses on the feelings, emotions, reactions and judgements of the writer in relation to other people, things or phenomena (Martin and White 2005, pp. 42–45). The article data was analyzed and annotated through a close reading approach. The analysis revealed considerable differences in the amounts of APPRAISAL; both corpora from the 2015–2016 period contained over twice the amount of instances of their counterparts in the 2019–2020 period. Donald Trump was evaluated in a positive manner twice as much in Washington Examiner than in the Washington Post during both time periods, while the amount of negative APPRAISAL had nearly the exact same amount of instances. Additionally, the 2016 campaign period data from Washington Examiner contained the most variation in terms of all three attitudinal categories (AFFECT, JUDGEMENT and APPRECIATION) and respective subcategories when compared to the other corpora. General implications based on the results include that Trump’s 2016 campaign run had more significance in the media, that media bias could be aligned with the amounts and polarity of evaluation between the outlets, and that Trump’s attacks on news outlets during his presidency may have impacted the amount of evaluation he received during his 2020 campaign. The use of perceived media bias proved beneficial for a comparison, despite not leading up to conclusive results on how slight differences in on the opposite sides of the bias might affect evaluation. The Appraisal framework, while introducing some subjectivity through the qualitative analysis, proved to be useful in assessing different attitudes that writers and other appraisers had of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate. In terms of future research, more attention could be paid on other aspects of news outlets, such as circulation and viewership or authorial differences, even when comparing based on perceived media bias. Overall, this thesis succeeded in its goal to assess how Donald Trump was appraised by two partisan news outlets during his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.