In my recent posts I’ve been exploring the choices in language use (or discourse) that CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC made when reporting on the recent fiscal cliff negotiations.  I said that patterns of choices that different writers or groups make can tell us about their biases (read more about this in my first post).  I also looked closely at the different uses of words like “income” in one post and “hikes” and “revenue” in another post.  Read more ›

I’ve been looking at media outlets’ coverage of the recent fiscal cliff negotiations, examining how different news outlets differed in the choices they made in reporting the events and how these different choices in discourse might reveal their biases (to read more about choices and biases in discourse, check out my first post).  In my last post, I looked at how the word “income” was used more frequently in the MSNBC coverage of the fiscal cliff than it appeared in news articles on politics in general from the same time period (in other words, it was a key word).  In comparison to MSNBC, CNN and Fox News used the word less frequently.  When I examined the uses of the word “income” more closely, I found substantive differences in the way the three networks used the word (read about them here). Read more ›

In my last post, I started thinking about media bias by looking very closely at how the choices we make when we talk or write about events can lead to diverse interpretations of the same event.  It turns out that we can choose to say different things about events and still all be accurate in our descriptions (of course, that’s not to say we can say anything and still be accurate).  Importantly, the choices we make stem from our biases, and it is unavoidable that all discourse (that is speech, writing, and other forms of communication) is in some sense biased.  Therefore, the more interesting question is not whether the media is biased but how it is biased. Read more ›

Greetings!  Welcome to the inaugural post of my blog, linguistic pulse. I’m writing here to share my perspective on language and its use in discourse related to politics, education, and society more generally with anyone who might be interested.  In particular, the way I see these things is shaped by my own background as an applied linguist who is interested in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.  If you’re not sure what these things are, that’s not a problem.  In fact, I’ve decided to write this blog specifically to communicate with people who are not familiar with my academic discipline because I think the perspective offered by scholars in these fields is one that many others will find intriguing, challenging, and hopefully also empowering.  Thus, my goal with this blog is to present a perspective on these issues that echoes the sophisticated, rigorous studies found in these disciplines while being accessible and interesting to a larger audience.

As my first attempt at this, I’ve decided to take up a set of questions that have long interested me: Is the media biased?  Read more ›