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

Lexis in general as well as collocations can be revealing of bias. Lexis is widely
considered to be an essential part of CDA because of the ability of vocabulary to
reveal "socially shared beliefs" (van Dijk 2001: 99) of a community and because
vocabulary "most directly influences...the opinions and attitudes of recipients" (ibid.,
also Fairclough 1989: 110-111 and Fowler 1991: 82). As for collocations, the use of,
for example, illegal immigrant and undocumented immigrant in the California
Dream Act articles highlights the different stances taken by the news organizations
(further analyzed in section 8.2.2). However, lexis based analysis has received some
of the most passionate criticisms in CDA, and, therefore, my aim is to analyze the
data by other means first and only secondarily through lexis. It is interesting to note
that certain aspects of lexical analysis are accepted, so to speak, even by Widdowson,
one of the main critics of CDA. He posits that an acceptable method of lexical
analysis is one which pinpoints all instances of a certain word and then analyzes the
contexts in which they occur (1998: 148). This method is used in this thesis.
Referential chain or referential identity chain analysis refers to the type of analysis
in which all instances of reference to a particular entity are separated from the body
of text and analyzed (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 535, 554, and 579-82). For
example, if analyzing articles about the big health care reform that took place in the
U.S. during Obama's presidency, references could include health care, Obamacare,
and it. If Obamacare were to appear in the BBC article more often than in that of the
other two websites, it could be claimed that BBC's stance is more right-leaning than
that of the other two because of the use of the right-wing term. This manner of
analysis is used not only with entities that appear in Theme position but also
generally with key terms specified for each topic separately (e.g. the potential users
of emergency contraception in the Morning-after pill articles). Referential identity
chain analysis is also very similar to the kind of lexical analysis that Widdowson
approves of in the sense that the same entity is followed throughout a text. In certain
referential chain analyses, then, the context is analyzed also.
Lastly, a method of analysis that is useful when comparing multiple texts is the
prioritization of information. This method is especially useful when analyzing hard
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