When language divides: how U.S. media discourse shapes ideology on abortion

This paper entitled “When language divides: how U.S. media discourse shapes ideology on abortion” aims to analyse how the topic of abortion is represented within the highly polarised context of the United States, taking media discourse as the primary object of investigation. Specifically, the study seeks to examine how major U.S. media outlets report on this issue and whether, in doing so, they convey ideologically slanted opinions. To identify if and how linguistic bias is manifested, two corpora of news articles were compiled, allowing the analysis to be conducted directly on authentic published material. More precisely, the articles were collected from CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times as representatives of left-leaning media outlets, and from Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Times as representatives of right-leaning ones. The paper is structured into five chapters: at the beginning an introductory chapter explains the topic and the objectives of the paper, then the second one presents a review of the existing literature, subsequently, the chapter of the analysis investigates real data and it is followed by the discussion of the findings, and lastly, a concluding chapter summarises the results. The underlying hypothesis of this study is that linguistic choices play a crucial role in shaping the expression of ideas and in fostering biased representations of reality. This will be explored in depth through the case study of abortion discourse in the United States.