Affiliation:
1. Southern Illinois University – Carbondale, USA
Abstract
This chapter acknowledges the truism that “television is a visual medium” but discusses six reasons for sometimes focusing scholarly attention on the non-visual, lexical content of TV news and commercials. It summarizes three different lexical analyses of network TV news dealing with economic news reporting, the reporting of presidential approval polls, as well as general presidential news coverage. All three studies were carried out within the context of charges of political news bias, and all three found evidence to support public perceptions of such bias. The fourth study summarizes a longitudinal analysis of presidential campaign TV commercials from 1952-2008. The particular focus of this study was to look for lexical differences in the content of commercials from winning vs. losing campaigns. The four studies summarized in this chapter demonstrate that, even in this visual age of television, words still mean things.