Female Linguistic Differences Based on the Addressee’s Gender in Fox News Coverage

Abstract

Journalism outlets provide coverage of Capitol Hill’s endeavors, but the passion and tension within the political atmosphere can elicit subconscious bias in treatment of interviewed parties. This study selects three female anchors’ respective July 12, 2018 Fox News broadcasts and analyzes their gender-isolating tendencies to offer mitigative or assertive language when engaging with male versus female interviewees. The data collected for the three anchors followed a trend of utilizing authoritative forms of language towards women and deferring with reservation towards men. These anchors displayed selective choices in the visibility of expressing dissent with significantly more interruptions of female guests and a greater use of hedges towards male guests. When accounting for the political parties of the interviewees, the anchors offered more deference to Democratic male guests than female Republican guests or female Fox News correspondents. These findings indicated a sociolinguistic difference which could possibly indicate a denial of equal opportunity to female interviewees on news broadcasts.