Media Framing between Fox News vs. CNN in the 2020 United States Presidential Election: How did Fox News and CNN frame the 2020 presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and what does this tell us about media partisanship?
2021 (engelsk)Independent thesis Basic level (degree of Bachelor), 10 poäng / 15 hp
Oppgave
Abstract [en]
This thesis is constructed as a qualitative small-n analysis with the aim to understand how media framing is presented by Fox News and CNN (Cable News Network) in the 2020 presidential elections between elected Democrat nominee Joe Biden, and his opponent Donald Trump’s campaign for his second presidential term in office. This thesis uses Entman’s (1993) work on the importance of framing in the media. This is in order to make any frames used by the media more visible. It may impact elections as the media affects the public by subjecting them to a bias framing of certain events. We have chosen Fox News and CNN as our two mainstream media news networks for analysis. The results of our qualitative analysis showed U.S media framing is president between both Fox News and CNN in their broadcast. Fox News shows support for Donald Trump, while writing negatively on Joe Biden and the Democrat party. CNN shows loyal support for Democrat nominee Joe Biden. While CNN supports Joe, they continue to attack Trump during his campaign run and his presidency in their network. This study has chosen 12 important key events in the 2020 presidential run to analysis. Such events include, the first and second presidential debate, Joe Biden announcing his choice for vice president, vice president debate, and November 3rd, election day. For each event we take news articles, nightly broadcast, reports both done by Fox and CNN respectively covering the same event and analysis how framing is presented in both of their publishing’s. This study confirms a number of points and discussions done by previous scholars and literature review that media framing is present in the U.S media. Our main goal and aim is to understand why media framing is such an important factor for political elections in the U.S, using the 2020 as a test. We also would like to mention a few gaps in our research, one being the number of media events we covered were strictly after Joe Biden won the democratic nominee. We could have covered more media events before Joe Biden winning the democratic nominee but wanted to stick with the battle between Biden & Trump. Lastly, we would also like to highlight why our research contributes to the political field, we felt there was not much research presented in the political field for the 2020 presidential election in media framing specially between Fox News & CNN. We felt our thesis contributes to the political research due to the importance of the media effecting a presidential election and we wanted data to highlight the importance of the media’s role in an election.
sted, utgiver, år, opplag, sider
2021. , s. 61
Emneord [en]
Fox News, CNN, Framing theory, Entman, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, U.S
HSV kategori
Identifikatorer
URN: urn:nbn:se:hv:diva-16897Lokal ID: EIS501OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hv-16897DiVA, id: diva2:1582720
Fag / kurs
Political science
Utdanningsprogram
International Programme in Politics and Economics
Veileder
Examiner
2021-08-202021-08-032021-08-20bibliografisk kontrollert