COMPARATIVE DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ON MEDIA RELATED TWEETS OF PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP AND SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the language and the attitude of two well-known U.S. politicians, U.S. President Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, towards media in their social media messages on Twitter microblogging site. The comparison and analyses are performed using Fairclough’s analytical framework of the socio-cultural approach of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA): text, discourse practice, and sociocultural practice. The data consists of 50 non repetitive recent media related tweets collected from personal accounts of Trump and Sanders. The findings indicate that Trump uses an informal, direct, and provoking communication style to construct and reinforce the concept of a homogeneous people and a homeland threatened by the dangerous and biased other (media) while Sanders having more democratic, liberal language, and focuses on more tangible, important social issues such as environment, education, and health problems as he himself prominences often. Moreover, Trump employs positive self-presentation and negative other presentation to further promote his agenda via social media. Bernie Sanders on the other hand criticize media for a set of different reasons. Although they both criticize the media extensively in their usage of Twitter, discourse analyses indicate that the underlying political motivations are fundamentally different. Article visualizations: