Donald Trump’s rise to fame started before he ever decided to run for president. His muppet like antics and his inability to watch his mouth are something many stressed out, pissed off, overworked and large-dreaming Americans love. He is entertaining. Not in the way Bush was, I mean, you would not want to have a beer with the man, but you would definitely want to listen to him give a pyramid scheme type speech about how to become rich AF. And you would believe him. Because he talks like you. He doesn’t seem to have a higher IQ then you, either, which makes it very likely that you could achieve what he has achieved.
And, let’s admit it. The media loves the guy. He is just so damn newsworthy. Scandals reigning as if TMZ’s editor in chief was running the show. And it isn’t just the Republican news sources that love talking about him. News sources claiming alliances to the Democratic party are as much part of the problem. How? By talking about him as much as they did and by adding certain linguistic features to their articles that are naturally going to get us thinking about his legitimacy. I mean…could he be right after all? He seems scary. Life is scary. Should I follow him?
There have been many ideas and thoughts circling around claiming that the media is at fault for Trump’s rise in popularity. They have been covering his presidential campaign like it was going out of style. Like he actually had something important to contribute. But the manipulation goes much deeper.
So I took it upon myself to take a closer, linguistic look at the array of news articles covering the Republican presidential campaign to see if I could find a pattern of subliminal Trump-Love coming from the liberal news sources. And, OMG, did I find it. I am sorry to say this but I am pretty sure the liberal media actually helped people cross over to the dark side. Not because they said nice things about him, but because they made him seem larger than life, like he could not be beaten. Like he was a small man with a huge force of power behind him. Up there on that pedestal with Darth Vader and Leather Face, he achieved what every entertainer…uhm, sorry… politician wants. FAME. Americans love famous people. They soak it up and bathe in it. Even liberals (Don’t lie!) So thank you, liberal media, for, rather than opposing or even distracting from Donald Trump’s bullshit campaign…you pulled out the red carpet.
When linguists want to find patterns, they analyze a collection of texts. I chose ten texts from different liberal news sources including The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, CNN, and The Huffington Post.
First I wanted to get a better idea of the skill level of the journalists, considering that their linguistic skill could have an influence on the word choice of the articles. I found that the overall lexical density of the texts, which is something linguists use to determine the proficiency of authors, mainly focused on their vocabulary, was about 39%. This number is very normal. It implies an average level of proficiency and is a very common result when investigating most articles put out by major news sources. So we could not blame the intellect or journalistic ability of the authors here.
After that I checked out the most frequently used words. “Trump” is the only candidate, whose name appears in the top 30 most frequently used words in the articles, with “Carson” coming in second. Terrifyingly enough, however, while the Donald comes in at Nr. 4 of the most frequent freaking lexical nouns, Carson is Nr. 29. I mean, that is a huge difference.
And not only does Trump’s name pop up a whole lot of times, but the words surrounding his name are absolutely terrifying: the most common verbs used in sentences regarding his presidential campaign are ‘defeat’, ‘fight’, ‘beat’, ‘oppose’ while the adjectives are usually words that imply a certain degree of status or power such as ‘large’, ‘radical’, and ‘super’.
So what does that mean? Well…it means we are supposed to fear him, doesn’t it? And what do humans do when they are afraid? What are the two most common reactions? – Submission or resistance.
Now if we take a look around ourselves right now. Go ahead, take a look out of the window! Do you see much resistance? Do you see people fighting their labor-slavery? No?
Me neither!
So I guess my point is, the liberal media needs to stop following trends. If you really want to make a difference, be as progressive as you claim, then don’t hold people back by worrying about keeping up with gossip, fear-mongering and trends.
Because now he is President of the United States and I BLAME YOU, because you should have known better!