Framing in Political News: Presentation of Trump during the Presidential Elections of 2016.
Keywords
Loading...
Authors
Issue Date
2019-06-07
Language
en
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
This study has aimed to assess the variations in the usage of negative versus positive framing devices to present Trump in states that either voted for or against him during the presidential elections of 2016. It aspired to find support for the assumption that news articles positively reflect the viewpoints of the electorate in a state and the ideas of the favoured presidential candidate, and negatively reflect the opposing party within U.S. politics. A corpus analysis of sixty articles from online newspapers from states that either voted for or against Trump has shown that overall there are only few variations between the usage of positive or negative framing between the two groups of states. No significant difference was found between negative and positive framing in the states that voted for and those that voted against him. Yet, the framing device ‘negative characteristics and traits’ appeared to be used significantly more in newspapers from states that voted against Trump than in newspapers from states that voted for Trump. Based on these results, it can thus not be concluded that the vote of the electorate in a state is related to the usage of positive or negative framing in news articles in that state, except for the negative framing device ‘negative characteristics and traits’.
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Letteren