Media representations of reporting techniques of four news houses related to two mediated events during the Trump administration

Abstract

Media representations, embedded in reported media events, play a pivotal role in the propagation of beliefs, ideologies and establishing the status quo. The media events are given coverage by news reports on newsworthy topics, and in this case, politics. In this mini-dissertation, two particular media events, namely the Travel Ban instituted by President Donald Trump, and making Jerusalem the official capital of Israel, were analysed based on the different viewpoints writers portrayed on the same media events. Being contemporary political events related to the current President of America, it was evident that a standard news structure was common and spatial positioning of texts was a noticeable key feature of news report. The use of pronouns as the subject in headlines, including nominalisations, clause embedding and speech acts, clarified implicit and underlying meanings of the text. The linguistic choices made by the writers had a direct link to the text, which propagated Trump’s social and political ideologies positively and negatively based on these choices. The textual construct of four online news reports from four American-based newspapers presented both positive and negative revelations about Trump’s political aims. The stance of writers pronounced subjective views in three of the four the news reports. The contentious issue of Jerusalem proved to be sensitive one, in that the religious sensibilities played a major role in the dispute of Palestinian lands. The linguistic choices most utilised were non-cohesive use of grammar rules as opposed to other texts; linguistic techniques, such as the discourse of exclusion; and the choice of wording, particularly understood within the Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) framework.