Selected american media coverage of the 2008 US presidential election a critical discourse analysis

presidential election: a critical discourse analysis Lê Thị ngọc Anh Trường Đại học KHXH&NV Luận văn ThS.. Năm bảo vệ:2009 Abstract: This minor thesis aims at examining ideological co

Selected american media coverage

of the 2008 u.s presidential election:

a critical discourse analysis

Lê Thị ngọc Anh

Trường Đại học KHXH&NV Luận văn ThS Chuyên ngành:; Mã số: 60.22.15 Người hướng dẫn: Prof Nguyễn Hòa, Ph D

Năm bảo vệ:2009

Abstract: This minor thesis aims at examining ideological constructions of representations of

the two candidates running in the United States Presidential Election 2008, Mr Barack Obama (Democratic Party) and Mr John McCain (Republican Party) by two American dailies, The New York Times and New York Post

45 pieces of news coverage from September 1st to October 30th, 2008 were taken randomly from these two newspapers to make a corpus In the light of Critical Discourse Analysis, the analysis was then undertaken on this corpus in two stages: transitivity analysis of headlines and discursive strategies analysis of sample full-text news reports

The analysis findings revealed that, in opposition to a tradition of seeking relative neutrality and objectivity in American journalism, these two newspapers deliberately chosen a “fair and balanced” coverage – “fair and balanced” in their own viewpoint As a result, the two dailies news coverage of the candidates showed their totally different political stance in term of who they backed up in the 2008 run to the White House Apparently, media and politics have such a close relationship and the classical ideological bias in media is unavoidable At the end of the day, certain American media institutions still tend to be more democratic or republican

Keywords: Phân tích diễn ngôn; Tiếng Anh; Báo chí; Bầu cử Tổng thống Mỹ

Content:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DECLARATION i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ii

ABSTRACT iii

ABBREVIATIONS iv

LIST OF TABLES v

LIST OF APPENDICES vi

PART 1: INTRODUCTION 1 Rationale 1

2 Scope of the research 2

3 Aims of the research and research questions 2

4 Methodology of the research 3

5 Background information about the 2008 U.S Presidential Election 3

6 Design of the research 5

PART 2: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 6

1.1 What is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)? 6

1.2 The development of CDA 6

1.3 Directions in CDA 7

1.3.1 Van Dijk 7

1.3.2 Wodak 9

1.3.3 Fairclough 10

1.4 Principles of CDA 10

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY 12

2.1 Data 12

2.1.1 Data source 12

2.1.1.1 The New York Times 12

2.1.1.2 New York Post 12

2.1.2 Data collection and sampling 13

2.2 Analytical framework and methods 13

2.2.1 Headlines analysis 13

2.2.2 Full-text news report analysis 15

CHAPTER 3: DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION 16

3.1 Headlines analysis 16

3.1.1 The New York Times 17

3.1.1.1 Representation of Mr Obama 17

3.1.1.2 Representation of Mr McCain 20

3.1.2 New York post 22

3.1.2.1 Representation of Mr Obama 23

3.1.2.2 Representation of Mr McCain 25

3.2 Full-text stories analysis 26

3.2.1 Naming referent 26

3.2.1.1 The New York Times 26

3.2.1.2 New York Post 27

3.2.2 Lexicalization 29

3.2.2.1 The New York Times 29

3.2.2.2 New York Post 33

PART 3: CONCLUSION 1 Summary of major findings 36

2 Suggestions for further research 36

REFERENCES

APPENDICES

1

Part 1: INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale

Everyday we use language, in other words - produce discourse, to negotiate, to give information, to ask for information or to make choices; in short, to communicate To discourse analysts, “discourse” means actual instances of communication in the medium of language In the discourse we produce are conventional ways of talking that create and perpetuate systems of ideologies and sets of beliefs about how the world works Van Dijk (1988) points out that discourse, in a wider sense, is a complex unit of language form, meaning and actions that might best be captured under the notion of a communicative event or communicative act

Among many types of discourse produced under different contexts/communicative events, journalistic discourse has some very specific textual characteristics, specific methods of text production and consumption, and is defined by a particular set of relationships between itself and other agencies of symbolic and material power As Fowler (1991) pointed out, the language of the news is never neutral, and articles within newspaper must

be regarded as constructed “stories” told from particular point of view When it comes to journalistic discourse analysis, the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach is often employed CDA is a methodology that enables a vigorous assessment of what is meant when language is used to describe and explain

How the media describe and explain things or events and portray people can have a great influence on the public who often have decisions and choices to make That explains why the role of the media in electoral politics is key to the functioning of a democracy, because now most voters increasingly use the media as their primary source of information

All the information about discourse and media briefly mentioned above leads the author of

this thesis to the research topic and conduct a small study entitled “Selected American

Media Coverage of the 2008 U.S Presidential Election: A Critical Discourse Analysis”

2

2 Scope of the research

Within the limit of a minor thesis, this research focus only on the texts of the news reports published from 31st August 2008 to 1st November 2008 in the two dailies The New York Times and New York Post, on the topic of the 2008 U.S Presidential Election In this research, 45 headlines and 24 full-text news reports are analyzed As this is a purely linguistic study, the author is not, by any means or in any way, expressing her own political point of view

3 Aims of the research and research questions

The general goal of this research is to investigate the ideological function of language in representing the world and constructing certain realities The main objective is to look into the ways language be employed by two media institutions to produce discourse to present the two 2008 U.S presidential candidates More specifically, this thesis aims at:

- Providing a textual analysis of the news on the 2008 U.S presidential election in the light

of Critical Discourse Analysis

- Giving an illustration of the CDA concepts as well as analysis procedures

- Conveying a message that CDA provides a useful, systematic way for language users and language learners to begin raising awareness of the ideologies embedded in discourse, as language not only reflects and records but also shapes, distorts and even create realities, both culturally and naturally

To achieve these aims, the following research questions are proposed:

(i) What are the representations of the two 2008 presidential candidates, the

Republican John McCain and the Democrat Barack Obama, constructed by The New York Times and the New York Post?

(ii) What are the underlying ideologies embedded in the way The New York Times

and New York Post represent the two candidates?

(iii) How are such ideologies encoded in the discourse of the two newspapers?

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4 Methodology of the research

Following in this part is a brief summary of the basic steps taken in the research

The first step is to conduct a literature review The author searched for reference via the thesis advisor, Dr Nguyen Hoa, lectures of related subjects like Research Methods, Applied Linguistics, etc., books and journals in the libraries and materials from the Internet

The second step is searching for data News reports published from 31st August 2008 to 1st November 2008 in the two selected newspapers were collected Then the data for analysis were sampled through random sampling Through thoroughly examining of the sampled data, closely looking into prominent linguistic features in the data, proper analytical tools were then decided

The next step in investigating two sets of data – headlines and full-text news reports

- Analyzing selected headlines according to transitivity system

- Analyzing selected full-text news reports according to two discursive strategies of naming referents and lexicalization

Through the analysis of the two sets of data, the study attempts to find out the similarities

as well as differences in the way the two newspapers reported on the same topic, the same people Based on the findings, further ideologies embedded in the text are discussed

5 Background information about the 2008 U.S Presidential Election

The United States presidential election of 2008 was held on Tuesday, November 4, 2008 It was the 56th quadrennial United States presidential election Outgoing Republican President George W Bush's policies and actions and the American public's desire for change were key issues throughout the campaign, and during the general election campaign, both major party candidates ran on a platform of change and reform in Washington Domestic policy and the economy eventually emerged as the main themes in the last few months of the election campaign, particularly after the onset of the 2008 economic crisis

Democrat Barack Obama, then - junior United States Senator from Illinois, defeated Republican John McCain, the senior United States Senator from Arizona Nine states

4

changed allegiance from the 2004 election Each had voted for the Republican nominee in

2004 and contributed to Obama's sizable Electoral College victory The selected electors from each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia voted for President and Vice President of the United States on December 15, 2008 Those votes were tallied before a joint session of Congress on January 8, 2009 Obama received 365 electoral votes, and McCain 173

There were several unique aspects of the 2008 election The election was the first in which

an African American was elected President, and the first time a Roman Catholic was elected Vice President It was also the first time two sitting senators ran against each other

It was the first election in 56 years in which neither an incumbent president (Bush was barred from seeking a third term by the Twenty-second Amendment) nor a vice president (Dick Cheney did not seek the presidency) ran It was also the first time the Republican Party nominated a woman for Vice President and only the second time a woman was nominated for Vice President on a major party ticket Also, voter turnout for the 2008 election was the highest in at least 40 years

The two candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain are nearly 25 years apart in age This

is the largest age disparity between the two major party presidential candidates in history, surpassing Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, (23 years apart in age) who ran against each other in the 1996 presidential election On January 20, 2009, Obama was inaugurated to the presidency at the age of 47 years 138 days He is the fourth youngest man to be elected president, after John Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Ulysses Grant, and the fifth youngest president when inaugurated, after Kennedy, Clinton, Grant, and Theodore Roosevelt Polls taken in the last few months of the presidential campaign as well as exit polls conducted on Election Day showed the economy as the top concern for voters

In the fall of 2008, many news sources were reporting that the economy was suffering its most serious downturn since the Great Depression During this period John McCain's election prospects fell with several politically costly comments about the economy

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6 Design of the research

The study is divided into three main parts:

Part 1 – Introduction: in this part are the rationale, the scope of the research, the aims of the research, the research questions, the methodology, some background information about the

2008 U.S Presidential Election and the design of the research

Part 2 – Development: this is the main part of the research and has three chapters

Chapter 1: Theoretical background: this chapter present related theoretical background for the research

Chapter 2: Methodology: this chapter describes steps and procedures of the research

Chapter 3: Data analysis and Discussion: this chapter analyzes the data and discusses the findings of the analysis

Part 3 – Conclusion: this is a summary of the findings and some suggestions for further research

REFERENCES

1 Fairclough, N (1989) Language and Power Harlow: Longman

2 Fairclough, N (1992) Critical Language Awareness London & New York:

Longman

3 Fairclough, N (1995) Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language

(Language in Social Life Series) London

4 Fairclough,N / Woddak, R (1997) Critical Discourse Analysis In van Dijk,

T.A.(ed) Introduction to Discourse Analysis London, pp 258-284

5 Fairclough, N (2001) Language and Power London: Longman

6 Fowler, R et al (1979) Language and Control London: KRP

7 Fowler, R (1991) Language in the news: Discourse and Ideology in the Press

London & New York: Routledge

8 Halliday, M.A.K (1994) An Introduction to Functional Grammar London:

Arnold

9 Hoa, N (2003) Phân tích Diễn ngôn: Một số Vấn đề Lý luận và Phương pháp

Hanoi: Nxb ĐHQGHN

10 Hoa, N (2006) Phân tích Diễn ngôn Phê phán, Lý luận và Phương pháp Hanoi:

Nxb ĐHQGHN

11 Kress, G (1991) “Critical Discourse Analysis”, in Annual Review of Applied

Linguistics, Vol.11 Cambridge: CUP, pp 84-97

12 van Dijk, T.A (1988) News as Discourse New Jersey: Erlbaum

13 van Dijk, T.A (1991) Racism and the Press London: Soutledge

14 van Dijk, T.A (1993) Principles of discourse Analysis In: Discourse & Society,

4(2): 249 – 283

15 van Dijk, T.A (1995) Discourse Analysis as Ideology Analysis In S.& A l

Wenden (eds) Language and Peace Dartmouth: Aldershot, pp 17-33

16 van Dijk, T.A (1998) Ideology - A multidiscipline study London: Sage

17 Van, Hoang Van (2006) Introducing Discourse Analysis Hanoi: Nxb Giáo Dục

18 Woddak, R (1996) Disorders in Discourse London: Longman

19 Woddak, R (2001) “What’s CDA about – a summary of its history, important

concepts and its development” In Woddak, R & Mayer, M Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis London: Sage

Websites:

www.nypost.com

www.nytimes.com

www.wikipedia.org

www.journalism.org

www.discourse-analysis.com

www.etd.lsu.edu

www.socialresearchmethods.net