A Lexical Analysis of American and Non-American Political News

Abstract

This study examines lexical choice used in news reports reporting the protests against Donald Trump. 20 news articles were selected from CNN and Al Jazeera between November 9, 2016 – January 1, 2017. This paper narrows the scope down to the content words: nouns, adjectives, reporting verbs, and action verbs. The results come out that nouns referring to the President are mostly used, while the adjectives are mostly used to describe the demonstrations. Moreover, the negative tone of nouns and adjectives such as riot and nasty are occasionally used by Al Jazeera, but hardly used by CNN. For verbs, both CNN and Al Jazeera used neutral reporting verbs more than strong reporting verbs. At the end of this paper, the recommendations together with the discussion covered 2 aspects which are anti-Americanism and commercialization are stated.