Date of Award

3-2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in English Composition

Department

English

First Reader/Committee Chair

Vickers, Caroline

Abstract

The news media is one of the main influences of people’s perception, especially during elections. It can have an influence on a voter’s perception during and after the results of an election. One of the issues that arises is that news reports are biased, which affects viewers’ perceptions and interpretations of the information reported. This paper presents an analysis of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in the genre of news media and further shows that prosodic features is another layer of analysis in CDA. I am looking specifically at how news broadcasts construct information after the 2016 election results. News media that represent either conservative liberal or Right-wing both use strategies to manipulate information even when the viewer wants to think of news media as neutral. In this paper, nine news reports that represent either conservative liberal or Right-wing from four leading news broadcasts were analyzed: Fox News, ABC News, NBC News, and CNN Breaking News.

A transcription key organized the notes made of the micro element patterns seen in each report, which the patterns are color-coded. Observations were made through differences in the visual content shown, word choices, face-threatening acts, phonetic features, and prosodic features. Vowels and intonation was analyzed through the program Praat, a free computer software package for the scientific analysis of speech in phonetics, which spectrograms are included to show the patterns that are evident. The patterns revealed that news media presents information based on the side they represent and leave out information that contradicts their representation of reality. The phonetic features also show that there is a construction of emotional speech, which in turn affects how the audience perceives the information.

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