Trupization of American Television Journalism

Abstract

Since of Donald Trump was elected President of the US, American journalism in general and TV journalists in particular has been going through transformations in genres, topics, variety of linguistic means and general content strategy. The article is an attempt to determine the most significant changes in the news broadcast. Using the information content of CNN as the main detractor of Trump’s media policy, the author analyzes and describes the new trends in the broadcasting policy. These include a significant reduction in the number of news items per news bulletin, attractivation of panel discussions, dominance of political topics and Donald Trump himself as the main news maker, negative evaluation in the frontmen’s language, journalists’ switch-over from observing to criticizing and assessing, changes in the president’s image and in the concept of D. Trump in American mass media, and the emergence and development of a new “White House chaos” concept. The article shows the dynamics in the main CNN’s structural indicators, such as genres ratio, thematic preferences, linguistic components, over the past five years. The author infers that the adversarial relationship between the president and TV journalists results in overall decreased taping content quality and lower professional standards for frontment and news channel correspondents. In this relation, lack of objectivity, biased discussions and prevalence of negative evaluation are of particular concern. The research was carried out in the second half of 2018, a case study of CNN newscasts of 2017 and 2018.