Political Bias on BBC, CNN, and Fox News - Doria

Table of Contents
1 Introduction....................................................................................................... 1
2 The news media................................................................................................ 3
2.1 News in the online medium............................................................... 3
2.2 An outline of media discourse and related concepts......................... 5
2.3 Journalism and ethics........................................................................ 7
3 Critical Discourse Analysis.............................................................................. 9
3.1 Overview and brief history................................................................ 9
3.2 Norman Fairclough's approach to Critical Discourse Analysis......... 11
3.3 Critical Discourse Analysis and the media........................................ 15
3.4 Criticism............................................................................................ 17
4 The liberal-conservative divide in the United States........................................ 20
5 Previous research............................................................................................. 23
6 Data.................................................................................................................. 27
6.1 BBC................................................................................................... 27
6.2 CNN................................................................................................... 29
6.3 Fox News.......................................................................................... 31
6.4 Description of data............................................................................ 32
7 Methods........................................................................................................... 35
7.1 Systemic-functional grammar: A toolkit for analysis....................... 36
7.2 Analytic tools employed in this thesis.............................................. 37
8 Analysis........................................................................................................... 40
8.1 Headline analysis.............................................................................. 40
8.1.1 Theme in the headlines...................................................... 41
8.1.2 Quantitative analysis.......................................................... 46
8.1.3 Qualitative analysis............................................................ 47
8.2 Analysis of sets of articles................................................................. 61
8.2.1 Theme in the articles.......................................................... 62
8.2.2 The California Dream Act set............................................ 64
8.2.3 The Super-committee set.................................................... 68
8.2.4 The Morning-after pill set.................................................. 76
9 Discussion........................................................................................................ 83
10 Conclusion..................................................................................................... 91
References........................................................................................................... 93