One nation, under war
Did the language of Fox News and MSNBC converge during the invasion of Ukraine
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21739543 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Geoffrey Wetherell (0000-0002-9062-0339, Florida Atlantic University, corresponding author), Jordan L Thompson (0000-0002-7752-297X, Florida Atlantic University), Isabella Vallejo (Florida Atlantic University), Kevin Lanning (0000-0001-7707-3070, Florida Atlantic University) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 495-512 |
| Publication date | 2023-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1529-7489 • E-ISSN: 1530-2415 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/asap.12357 |
| OpenAlex | W4385256500 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 60 |
Evidence suggests that political differences have increased markedly in the United States in recent decades. Differences may also emerge in the way that partisans express themselves through language, and it is possible that language differences vary in times of crisis and war. In the current work we examined over a decade's worth of transcripts from a liberal (MSNBC) and conservative (Fox) news network. More specifically, we examined evidence for two competing perspectives on language differences during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. One perspective, the depolarization perspective, suggests that we should see decreased differences, or parity in language styles between the two networks leading up to and during the invasion. Another perspective, the polarization perspective, suggests we should see increased differences in language styles between networks leading up to and during the early stages of the invasion. We examined an index of personalizing and formalizing language as well as 77 Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionaries plus noun frequency using smoothed curves and linear discriminant function analyses (LDA) to examine the pattern of results in our data. Our results provide more support for the depolarization perspective, showing that both Fox News and MSNBC became more similar than different leading up to and during the invasion. Implications are discussed
Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Computer Science · Law · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Philosophy · Psychology · Sociopolitical Dynamics in Russia · Artificial Intelligence
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| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |