Reputationally damaging words in media discourses: How media distort Donald Trump’s image

Abstract

This article discusses how US and UK liberal media slowly but surely created a skewed representation of 45th US President Donald Trump. Asserting that the media are biase and the images of Donald Trump in print media show political slant of the newspapers, the research analyzes partisan media and image portraying words therein. Usage labels enable identification of the ever-powerful lexical instrument used by the media to create a distorted image of the politician and manipulate the citizens; therefore, the paper aims to analyze evaluative lexical items used in media texts to mould required images of Donald Trump. The research examines the articles on Donald Trump’s key activities in early 2020 in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the Independent. The methodological framework includes the data of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which is evenly divided between the five genres of spoken discourse, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals. Analyzing words in terms of their usage frequency in each of these genres provides a clear picture of the target audience. The Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners provides the most precise and comprehensive classification of the style labels, including “formal”, “informal”, “literary”, “impolite”, “showing disapproval”, “journalism”, and “phrasal verbs”. This combination of the corpus-based approach and the dictionary-based approach resulted from the need to supplement the research with quantitative and qualitative data to study manifestations of political slant in the media holistically. Analyzing image portraying words in the media enables us to describe the key evaluative vocabulary, study Donald Trump’s profile and interpretations of his activities in the liberal media, identify political bias and distortion of facts in mass communications, and define new trends in journalism, medialinguistics, and political communication.