Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis of News Reports on METOO Movement

Abstract

The METOO movement (or #METOO) has been widely reported by American media outlets. Politicians and social activists take advantage of this social movement as a great momentum to promote political, economic and social policies in multiple areas especially the ones related to women’s rights. In turn, the movement gained even more extensive media exposure. However, as people enter the #METOO era, the general public and media start to split into different camps in terms of their opinion about this social movement. In this paper, we can observe how two American news outlets with opposing partisan leanings -CNN and FOX News- use different linguistic devices and strategies to report the METOO movement, its associated events as well as actors and participants involved. By conducting a linguistic analysis of news discourse produced by both outlets, the signals of their respective attitudes or opinions can be detected. Corpus linguistic (CL) analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA) as synergetic approaches are presented to investigate news discourse produced by CNN and FOX News; the corpusbased study addresses different grammatic categories with a primary focus on the noun, while CDA or more specifically van Dijk’s news discourse model is applied in a case study of a specific news event to present a systematic and critical interpretation of news texts at different dimensions starting from the microstructural and macrostructural dimension (i.e. textual structure) up to superstructural (i.e. news schemata) and rhetorical dimension.