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

in the headline analysis when the style of reporting is appropriate. Otherwise, videos
are not further analyzed in this thesis. Having now described the data, I will continue
by discussing the methodology and the analytic tools.
7 Methods
As was discussed in 3.4, the reactions of the readership constitute an important part
of Fairclough's three-dimensional theory, but they cannot be taken into account here
due to the limited resources available. Other measures, such as detailed description
of the analysis process, are taken to improve reliability. My analysis is built on the
foundation of thematic structure and some statistical analysis as well as triangulation
of data (i.e. comparing three different articles or sets of headlines, for example). The
analysis is merely crystallized through lexical analysis and other observations.
Repetition and patterns come to play a role as well, as was mentioned in connection
with the discussion of naturalization. Additionally, when statistical and grammatical
analysis and linguistic cues do not provide sufficient evidence of bias, alternative
interpretations will be presented for a balanced view instead of attempting to claim
my interpretation is the only possible one given the available information.
Fairclough's model also requires extensive background knowledge of social and
societal structures that affect how the institutions in question operate and how the
discourse being produced is structured (e.g. Fairclough 1989: 26 and 1995: 74). This,
too, prevents me from fully complying with Fairclough's proposed methodology in
this language-based thesis. Instead, I have modified his methodology to
accommodate more linguistic analysis as the basis of argumentation. Such structures
will naturally not be disregarded as they constitute a vital component of Fairclough's
model. They will, however, be referenced only to the necessary extent, for example,
through the review of the history of the news organizations. Additionally, through the
analysis of articles from three websites, the second dimension of Fairclough's model
is automatically included: the use of three sources provides a framework of the
discourse practice against which individual texts must be evaluated.
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