News coverage of the Capitol invasion: An analysis of emotion talk in the right- and left-wing media

Abstract

This study focuses on the representation and use of emotion in news feature articles by left- and right-wing media. A qualitative discourse analysis was conducted to compare and gain insight on how emotion terms appear in twenty-four articles from two online newspapers the New York Times as a left-liberal newspaper and The Washington Times as a right-conservative newspaper. Emotion terms were analyzed based on linguistic level, valence, the emoter, emotion attribution, emotion source and how the emotion was placed in the text. Findings from the corpus analysis have shown that more words with negative emotion were used than positive words in both newspapers. These negative words were mostly adjectives and nouns. This was in line with findings of previous studies. Other findings in this research have also indicated that the representation of emotion is different between the two newspapers. This is an indication of the use of emotion in the media-biased landscape of the United States.