Construction of Political Affiliations in the language of anchors and reporters of Fox News (ID:179140)

INTRODUCTION The research paper sets out to explore political discourse of the Fox News Channel within the frames of pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and critical discourse analysis. The research is aimed at the disclosure of Fox News political bias during the 2016 US presidential election. In modern society, the importance of political communication is growing. The issue of power and authority is openly discussed in social democratic foundations. In recent years, some problems of political discourse have become topics of discussion in the scientific and journalistic literature. The category of discourse in general and political in particular is considered nowadays the subject of scientific debate. The late XX – early XXI century marked the development of completely new approaches to the analysis of discourse. The cognitive, pragmatic and critical discourse analysis aspects of communication are more and more often in the focus of linguistic analysis as they reveal socially and psychologically grounded forces represented in language. These tendencies also penetrate into the study of political discourse providing means for the thorough study of its basic characteristics and manipulative strategies within it from a new perspective. As a source for our investigation, we refer to the works of Norman Fairclough, Geoffrey Leech, Theo van Leeuwen, George Lakoff, Teun A. van Dijk and others. The object of this research is the language of anchors of Fox News during the period of the recent US presidential election. The subject of the present investigation is the political affiliations represented in the language of Fox News anchors. The corpus of the analysis is the transcripts of major Fox News programs and reports that cover the period of the last presidential election from October 2015 till October 2016. The novelty of this work lies in the attempt to give a thorough analysis of the discourse of the main media supporter of the Republican Party in the USA and the way Fox News propaganda affected the 2016 presidential election outcome. The anchors of Fox News use manipulative strategies which will be investigated by means of pragmatic, cognitive and critical discourse analysis. The topicality of present study is caused by the fact that modern political discourse represented in the media distorts the nature of true democratic politics preventing it from serving its initial purpose. A systemized and detailed knowledge of the main tools and techniques of manipulation in political discourse would contribute to the ability of the population to resist and recognize them. In other words, such approaches to the analysis of manipulative means as pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and critical discourse analysis may facilitate counteraction manipulative behavior. The methods of linguistic analysis applied in the research project include the main theoretical (analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction) and empirical (componential analysis, frame analysis) methods. Productive for this survey is the theoretical conclusions of works of Norman Fairclough, Geoffrey Leech, George Lakoff, Alan Cruse, Theo van Leeuwen and others. The aim of the thesis is to study the construction of political affiliations in the discourse of Fox News anchors that involves the implementation of the following objectives: • to outline the principal theoretical approaches to the study of political media discourse • to apply the methodology of pragmatic, cognitive and critical discourse analysis as the most efficient techniques in the study of political manipulation • to analyze the functions and effect of applied methodology in the construction of political affiliations of Fox News discourse • to demonstrate bias and manipulation strategies in the language of anchors of Fox News during the recent US presidential election. The practical value of the research paper is that the results of the study may be applied to the further studies dedicated to pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and critical discourse analysis. Moreover, the results of the research will help to understand how language can be used as a device to manipulate, persuade and affect the audience and voters. The structure of the master degree paper is as follows: it consists of an introduction, 2 parts, conclusions, summary and a list of references. The first part is a theoretical one, and it contains four chapters. The first one “Analytical frameworks for the investigation of Fox News language” deals with the methodology of the research in terms of pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and discourse analysis. The second chapter “Construction of social phenomenon and its interpretation” deals with the notion of construction, its study, and functions in discourse. The third chapter “Fox News background information” analyses the activity, ideology, and controversies of Fox News during the last years. The fourth chapter “The main characteristics of Republican and Democratic Parties in US politics” makes a brief comparison between the two major parties in US politics, namely the Republicans and the Democrats. The second part is a practical one, and it contains three chapters. The first one “Pragmatic representation of Fox News speech during the 2016 US presidential election” deals with political discourse of Fox News analyzed from the view point of Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle. The second chapter “Cognitive structures in the construction of ideological views of Fox News” analyses the use of cognitive structures to construct political preferences in the discourse of Fox News. The third chapter “Political discourse analysis of Fox News anchors in the 2016 US presidential election” reveals the manipulative means used by the anchors of Fox News analyzed in terms of critical discourse methods. In addition, it demonstrated how these techniques affected the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election. Conclusions enclose the generalization of the survey results and summarize the information being observed in the thesis.