Is there a difference between liberal newspapers and conservative newspapers in the VS regarding the use of war metaphors in COVID-19 news?
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2021-06-15
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en
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Abstract
COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020. The United States is one of the countries
that has been affected immensely by the virus and the public perceptions and political responses on
COVID-19 have been widely divided across the United States. The differences exist mostly between
Democrats and Republicans, which raises questions about the influence and the role that liberal and
conservative media and politicians have played in amplifying polarization and politicization of the
coronavirus. Many important political and social issues in American public discourse are often discussed in
terms of war. Historically, the United States government has often invoked war metaphors. In the beginning
of the pandemic, former United States president Trump referred to the COVID-19 virus in terms of war as
well. Kushner Gadarian, Goodman and Pepinsky (2020) concluded that Democrats are more likely to
comply with CDC-recommended behavior, and are generally more concerned about the pandemic. News
sources and their perceptions of the pandemic have influenced the behavior of their followers. Therefore,
this study set out to examine the differences in the usage of war metaphors between liberal and conservative
newspapers in the United Stated by collecting and analysing a corpus consisting out of 400 newspaper
articles from two liberal and two conservative leaning newspapers. The results showed little to no difference
in the usage of war metaphors between liberal and conservative newspapers. In line with expectations, the
results did show differences in the usage of type 2 (other) metaphors. The results of this study showed little
use of war metaphors in both liberal and conservative newspapers as well.
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