Analyzing a Corpus of President Trump’s Public Statements to Reveal Possible Media Bias

Authors

Kevin Zalewski, Brigham Young University
William Eggington, Brigham Young University

Keywords

America, political polarization, Media Insights Project, corpus linguistics

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

Political Science

Abstract

In recent years, America has become extremely politically divided. As political polarization has increased, so has distrust of the media, especially during President Trump’s current term of office. The Media Insights Project reports that “just 17 percent of Americans give the news media high marks for being ‘very accurate.’” In this partisan political landscape, it can be difficult to know where to turn for unbiased, unspun news coverage. Where can a person learn what the president has said on a given topic without some type of filter coloring the information? This possible bias is a problem that corpus linguistics can address. We demonstrate that a corpus of the president’s public statements can reveal degrees of media bias, or non-bias, thus allowing the truth-seeking political commentator and the general public to test media claims using a bias free, data-driven research tool.

Recommended Citation

Zalewski, Kevin and Eggington, William (2019) "Analyzing a Corpus of President Trump’s Public Statements to Reveal Possible Media Bias," Journal of Undergraduate Research: Vol. 2019: Iss. 2019, Article 28.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jur/vol2019/iss2019/28