Critical Discourse Analysis of Bret Baier’s Opinion Piece in FOX NEWS about His Interview with Crown Prince Mohamed Ben Salman

Abstract

The present study employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) to explore an opinion article written by FOX NEWS political anchor Bret Baier about his interview with the Saudi Crown Prince in 2023. This study is based on the assumption that the norms and values underlying any text are frequently implicit, not explicitly expressed. Through Fairclough’s approach to critical discourse analysis, a complex pattern emerged of linguistic mechanisms such as framing, lexical choice, mixing of genres and lack of hedging, together with selectivity and sourcing of content. These in turn could be interpreted and explained as expressing not only journalistic opinion but attention-seeking, self-promotion, audience design, and indeed journalistic reporting of events with the author as protagonist. The opinion part of the article itself, focused on the relative merits of US democracy and Saudi monarchy, was found to be problematic with respect to its claimed source (the previous interview) and to serve as much as a vehicle to signal the power of the author and the media as that of democracy versus monarchy. Suggestions are made for further research.