ANALYZING THE SENTIMENTS PORTRAYED BY THE GUARDIAN TOWARDS THE IMMIGRATION POLICIES OF DONALD TRUMP AND KAMALA HARRIS: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY

Abstract

This study examines The Guardian's coverage of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris' stances on immigration during the 2024/25 pre-election campaign. The researchers have analyzed 70 articles published in October of 2024 employing a mixed-methods approach for corpus analysis, that incorporates both qualitative thematic analysis and quantitative sentiment analysis with the help of the Orange software based on the Vader (Valence Aware Dictionary), which is a pre-trained sentiment parser that polarizes texts into positive, negative, neutral and compound sentiments and based on their sentiment score. The results show that The Guardian primarily highlights Harris's stances on immigration in a positive light, focusing on human rights and inclusivity. On the contrary, Trump's rhetoric is commonly associated with fear-related stories, national security issues, and exclusionary rhetoric. The study concludes that media framing plays a significant role in shaping public perceptions and influencing political polarization regarding immigration, and it also highlights the role of the press in shaping political debates. The study contributes to the existing research on media bias, emotional framing, the language of politics, and immigration coverage.