Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

258

Date

2011

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

English

Concentration

English as a Second Language

Committee Chair

Philip M. McCarthy

Committee Member

Charles E. Hall

Committee Member

Reginald Martin

Abstract

Hard news articles can reflect a media organization's bias. This study assesses bias in hard news articles published by Fox News and MSNBC. More specifically, the study examines bias in the two networks' coverage of elections and immigration. Indicative linguistic features identified by the Gramulator reveal biases in corpora of texts pertaining to these two news topics. The results suggest that the networks exercise selection bias. Furthermore, the findings show that the networks use the same collocations differently and also use different collocations to refer to the same referents.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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