The 2016 presidential primaries in the United States: a quantitative and qualitative approach to media coverage

Based on the theories of media frames and their application to discourse analysis, the objective of this study is to identify the discursive strategies of American newspapers in the coverage of the 2016 primary elections. A large corpus of more than 3,000 articles published in six national papers between January and March 2016 is analysed using the textual statistical tools Iramuteq and TXM. Several semi-automated operations, based on lexical co-occurrence (notably hierarchical descendant classification and factorial analysis) enable a re-construction of semantic cues, revealing ideological postures, argumentative strategies and thematic disparities between the different newspapers. In the paper, we address the subjective interpretation schemes inherent to the way each media outlet presents the different candidates depending on their communication contract, with a final focus on the candidate Donald Trump.