Ferguson and how it was brought to you. A Linguistic Analysis on how The Mass Media told the story of Michael Brown depending on their political ideology

Abstract

This article aims at exposing the specific language that the American mass media uses to portray events, as well as the many differences found in them based on their ideological allegiance, that is to say, whether they are conservative or liberal oriented. This analysis is built on the well-known Ferguson case in which a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager in the middle of a street. This paper offers an analysis of the first headlines of at least 8 different newspapers, paying special attention to the syntactic structures used, semantic roles as well as the chosen vocabulary.