California State University, San Bernardino CSUSB ScholarWorks Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations Office of aduateGr Studies 3-2020 “THIS IS A STUNNING, STUNNING NIGHT”: NEWS MEDIA CONSTRUCTIONS OF EMOTIONAL REALITY Karrina Janelle Oravetz California State University - San Bernardino Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd Part of the Applied Linguistics Commons, Discourse and Text Linguistics Commons, and the Phonetics and Phonology Commons Recommended Citation Oravetz, Karrina Janelle, "“THIS IS A STUNNING, STUNNING NIGHT”: NEWS MEDIA CONSTRUCTIONS OF EMOTIONAL REALITY" (2020). Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations. 971. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd/971 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Office of aduateGr Studies at CSUSB ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of CSUSB ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “THIS IS A STUNNING, STUNNING NIGHT”: NEWS MEDIA CONSTRUCTIONS OF EMOTIONAL REALITY A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University, San Bernardino In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in English Composition: Applied Linguistics and Teaching English as a Second Language by Karrina Janelle Oravetz March 2020 “THIS IS A STUNNING, STUNNING NIGHT”: NEWS MEDIA CONSTRUCTIONS OF EMOTIONAL REALITY A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University, San Bernardino by Karrina Janelle Oravetz March 2020 Approved by: Caroline Vickers, Committee Chair, English Parastou Feiz, Committee Member © 2020 Karrina Janelle Oravetz ABSTRACT The news media is one of the main influences of people’s perception, especially during elections. It can have an influence on a voter’s perception during and after the results of an election. One of the issues that arises is that news reports are biased, which affects viewers’ perceptions and interpretations of the information reported. This paper presents an analysis of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in the genre of news media and further shows that prosodic features is another layer of analysis in CDA. I am looking specifically at how news broadcasts construct information after the 2016 election results. News media that represent either conservative liberal or Right-wing both use strategies to manipulate information even when the viewer wants to think of news media as neutral. In this paper, nine news reports that represent either conservative liberal or Right-wing from four leading news broadcasts were analyzed: Fox News, ABC News, NBC News, and CNN Breaking News. A transcription key organized the notes made of the micro element patterns seen in each report, which the patterns are color-coded. Observations were made through differences in the visual content shown, word choices, face- threatening acts, phonetic features, and prosodic features. Vowels and intonation was analyzed through the program Praat, a free computer software package for the scientific analysis of speech in phonetics, which spectrograms are included to show the patterns that are evident. The patterns revealed that news media presents information based on the side they represent and leave out iii information that contradicts their representation of reality. The phonetic features also show that there is a construction of emotional speech, which in turn affects how the audience perceives the information. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge my committee members, Dr. Caroline Vickers and Dr. Parastou Feiz for guiding me through the process of this thesis. I appreciate their support for the reading of and contribution to this thesis. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................... v LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................... viii LIST OF FIGURES ………………………………………………………………….... xi CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE REVIEW Introduction .............................................................................................. 1 Literature Review ...................................................................................... 2 CHAPTER TWO: DATA COLLECTION AND METHODOLOGY Data Collection and Methodology …………............................................. 17 CHAPTER THREE: ANALYSIS OF MACRO PATTERNS, MICRO PATTERNS, AND PHONETIC FEATURES Introduction ............................................................................................ 22 Stance (word choices, images) …………………………………………….. 22 Face-threatening Acts ………………………………………………………. 35 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) …………………………………………. 40 Phonetic Features (Intonation, Vowel Analysis, and Filled Pauses) …… 45 CHAPTER FOUR: DISCUSSIONS OF IMPLICATIONS AND POSSIBLE FURTHER RESEARCH Discussion and Possible Further Research ............................................ 59 APPENDIX A: FOX NEWS TRANSCRIPTIONS ............................................... 62 APPENDIX B: ABC NEWS TRANSCRIPTIONS …………………………………. 80 APPENDIX C: NBC NEWS TRANSCRIPTION………………………………….. 102 APPENDIX D: CNN NEWS TRANSCRIPTION..……………………………...… 108 vi REFERENCES ................................................................................................. 113 vii LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Comparison of Intonation Tones and Breaks Indices Analysis in Fox News Report “Donald Trump Elected President: Fox News Alert” and “On Phone: Sean Hannity” .................................................................... 47 Table 2. Comparison of Competitive and Cooperate Interruption (Intonation) in CNN News Report “Protests Spread After Trump’s Stunning Victory” ................................................................................................ 49 Table 3. Words Pronounces by Emotional Speaker and Neutral Speaker to Evaluate Differences in Emotional States in CNN News Report “Protests Spread After Trump’s Stunning Victory” .............................................. 51 Table 4. Spectrogram Examples Comparing Words "you" in CNN News Report " Protests Spread After Trump's Stunning Victory" ……………………… 51 Table 5. Typical Vowels Formants Chart for Speakers in CNN News Report "Protests Spread After Trump's Stunning Victory" …………………….. 52 Table 6. Normalization Chart of Emotional and Neutral Speaker in CNN News Report "Protests Spread After Trump's Stunning Victory" ……………. 52 Table 7. Filler Pauses Based on 11 Categories by Clark & Trees (2002) in CNN Report "Protests Spread After Trump's Stunning Victory" ……………. 54 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Rhetorical Impact of Heart Monitor on NBC News ……………………. 32 Figure 2. Rhetorical Impact of Miley Cyrus Crying on NBC News ………...…… 33 Figure 3. Rhetorical Impact of Angry Protestors on ABC News ……………..…. 33 Figure 4. Rhetorical Impact of Explosions on ABC News ……………………..… 34 xi CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE REVIEW Introduction Reporting of events and information is a universal phenomenon. Particularly, news media is a mainstream source that reports events and information to millions of viewers. “Most of our social and political knowledge and beliefs about the world derive from the dozens of news reports we read or see every day” (Van Dijk, 1998, p.110). However, information presented is distorted, which means people are basing their knowledge on limited views and perceptions. According to Zhang (2014), language in news reports is never bias- free and it is branded by social values and different ideologies. (p. 2273) The purpose of my thesis is to bring attention to how various micro-level elements (such as register, stance, face-threatening acts, and phonetics) shape the macro- level (hidden ideologies/bias, manipulation, and distortion of reality) in the genre of news media. In particular, I am looking through the lens of CDA to understand how a variety of news broadcasts constructed information differently after the 2016 election results based on the political views of their target audiences. Furthermore, I intend to build on what scholars have said about bias and manipulation in the news genre by demonstrating how phonetic analysis of intonation, vowel analysis, and filler pauses construct the emotion of the event. Applying CDA in combination with phonetic analysis will demonstrate how news programs reveal stance and manipulate audiences. Ultimately, this thesis 1 will reveal how broadcast media news fulfills expectations of their primary audience and construct their own interpretations of reality. Literature Review An Overview of CDA in News Media Van Dijk (1992) examines some properties of the social power of the news media that influence public opinion. The power is “not restricted to the influence of the media on their audiences, but also involves the role of the media within the broader framework of the social, cultural, political, or economic power structures of society” (Van Dijk, 1992, p. 10). Van Dijk argues that “one needs to pay detailed attention to the structures and strategies of such discourses and to the ways these relate to institutional arrangements, on the one hand, and to the audience, on the other hand” (Van Dijk, 1992, p. 10). Media has the power to control the minds of readers or viewers in terms of how they view events or information. Events and information can be manipulated