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

there), Theme-Rheme analysis was demonstrated to be a viable primary method of
analyzing texts for bias. In combination with the comparative analysis method
employed, many criticisms directed at CDA research can be remedied, as has been
discussed. Every study has both strengths and weaknesses, however, and having now
outlined some of the ways in which the chosen analytic methods were a successful
choice for this type of research, weaknesses must also be reviewed.
Some limitations of the methods used in this thesis have already been discussed and
resolved. For example, the partial employment of Fairclough's model of CDA has
been justified through the use of various methods, such as triangulation of data and
explicit description of the analysis process, and, therefore, the issue will not be
further discussed here. Other limitations, however, remain to be noted. This thesis
considered only hard news items. This may be somewhat problematic because much
of the tone of news websites is set by their soft news content. For example, Fox
News is said to employ more conservative talk show hosts than CNN, and such
tendencies speak volumes of political views. Furthermore, this thesis was not
designed to consider any non-linguistic aspects of news reporting, such as layout and
pictures, which can also be revealing. Despite these limitations, the results of the
analysis do provide a supported indication of bias that validates the hypothesis and,
therefore, considering also non-linguistic and soft news items may simply reinforce
the result.
Another limitation of this study comes in the form of data collection methods. As it
was not possible to continuously monitor the output of the three websites, it may be
that not all relevant articles were collected - possibly affecting the outcome of both
the headline analysis and full article analysis. For example, it may have affected the
coherence of the sets of articles: if not all articles were collected, then there remains
the possibility that some sets of articles could have been a better match (e.g. in length
or style) than the ones selected for the qualitative analysis. This limitation, much like
the partial employment of Fairclough's CDA, was unavoidable in the confines of the
limited resources available. In any larger scale studies, the data collection methods
would be more all-encompassing and, thus, may alter the results somewhat. I
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