Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0005-5369-520X

Date Available

5-12-2025

Year of Publication

2025

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Linguistic Theory and Typology (MALTT)

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

Linguistics

Faculty

Mark Richard Lauersdorf

Faculty

Rusty Barrett

Faculty

Julien Carrier

Abstract

Over the last decade or so, politics in the United States has become increasingly polarized. A central focus of this polarization has been the news media, including both traditional print news, online news, and television news. Results of this have been a rapid rise in misinformation, disinformation, the demonization of news (especially political) providers as purveyors of ‘Fake News’, and distrust in mainstream news outlets. The central focus of this thesis is bias in news reporting, leading naturally to the question of how widespread this bias really is. This thesis uses corpus linguistic and discourse analytic methods to pursue this question in a targeted investigation. A framework by Reid (2019, 2022) was adapted for in corpus linguistics and applied to a corpus of news outlets discussing January 6th, 2021. While showing interesting trends, the results were overall inconclusive. The end of this thesis contains suggestions for a more robust analysis that might point to stronger conclusions. KEYWORDS: corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, agency

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2025.153

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