The Press War in the Post-Truth Era: A Corpus-Assisted CDA of the Discourse of US Political Analysts on Trump’s Figure and Policy

The study provides a different perspective on the presidential campaign. The article focusses not on the language of Trump himself, but his representation by political analysts in the media, using a combination of computational corpus analysis followed by critical discourse analysis. The authors construct two corpora of analysts’ responses to Trump’s tweets: the first in sources he has defined as promulgators of ‘fake news’ (for example the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post) and the second in those defined as ‘real news’ outlets (such as Breitbart and Fox). The authors compare the sharply contrasting presentation of various campaign stories (such as the FBI investigation into potential Russian interference with the election, and Trump’s reactions to releases from Wikileaks) in the ‘real news’ and ‘fake news corpora’ respectively. The authors argue that Trump’s division of the media into friends and enemies through the binary of ‘real’ and ‘fake’ has allowed him to effectively challenge widely accepted norms of morality and truth, providing a masterclass in Gramscian hegemonic theory.