Wording, Semantic Fields and Othering Discourses in News Media: A Study of the Accusation Process of of Christine Ford against Judge Brett Kavanaugh in CNN and Fox News

Abstract

One of the policies of the political parties in every society is to determine their attitudes towards the opponent political party. Media has a major role here in introducing some groups as “others” and some of them as “us”. In the United States the two main political parties of Democrats and Republicans support their representing media agencies such as CNN and Fox News and in return the news media reflect the news in accordance with their policies. Media’s language is a suitable domain for the analysis of this process. In this research, the same kind of process is studied through the language use in CNN and Fox News to clarify the differences, in narrating an identical story with the same characters. The story is about the allegations against judge Brett Kavanaugh, a Republican jurist and lawyer who was accused of trying to sexually attack Christine Ford at a party back in 1982 when they were both high school students. Christine Ford made the allegations in 2018 when Kavanaugh was selected as a candidate for a seat in Supreme Court. After an FBI investigation Kavanaugh was announced innocent. The reports covering the story on CNN and Fox News differ from each other. In order to find the differences of these two media, the phrases and vocabulary related to main subjects of the story such as Kavanaugh, Christine Ford and the investigations is extracted and analyzed. Then the two media reporting is compared by the different discourses they have used. On CNN Kavanaugh is associated with words that zoom on his negative points, and Ford is completely justified as a true victim. In reverse, Fox News is excessively magnifying Kavanaugh as a great person while it does not admit Ford as a believable accuser. Also the performed investigation was criticized by CNN and shown as a sham unlike Fox News that affirms it as accurate. CNN and Fox News have pictured the whole story through different discourses according to their own partisan biases.