Language Manipulation in COVID-19: A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis of News Reports

Abstract

The media uses language to manipulate its readers’ opinions. The present study is a critical discourse analysis of two news reports in the New York Times about the spread of COVID-19 in China and the US, respectively. This study focuses on the ideological representation of the news reports about a global issue. The editor aims to frame the news report about China with the use of emotive lexical items with negative connotations to invoke the public’s attention on a certain issue. While he frames the news report about the US with the use of lexical items with positive connotations to construct and present a positive image of the US. The study concludes that the news reports are pregnant with the ideologies of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation. These ideologies of in-group and out-group polarization reveal the editor’s vested interests and political inclinations, even as they claim to convey reality and purely neutral information to readers.