A Critical Discourse Analysis of Fox News’ Reporting on COVID Measures
Abstract
The Fox News Channel is the most-viewed cable television channel in the United States of America. It is known for practicing partisan reporting in favor of the Republican Party and has often been accused of lacking objectivity and not being fair and balanced, contrary to its original slogan. The article discusses the results from a critical discourse analysis of the spoken discourse aired on Fox News during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, specifically examining bias, especially right-wing bias. The corpus compiled for the study consisted of the spoken transcripts of all episodes of the morning show Fox and Friends aired between March 2020 and December 2021. The analysis focuses on identifying phenomena, such as language of power, bias towards favoring one side of a controversial issue, as well as what discursive strategies are used to achieve the desired effect, such as framing and phrasing of the hosts’ comments and arguments. Based on the analysis, I show the bias implicit in the text and the motivations behind Fox’s style of reporting. The article concludes with a discussion about its contributions and possibilities of further research, including a multimodal approach.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/nh.2023.8.39-56
Date of publication: 2023-12-23 00:15:54
Date of submission: 2023-05-31 12:07:07
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