Insurrection or Protest? A corpus-linguistic analysis of the news reporting by CNN and Fox News based on the January 6, 2021, events at the US Capitol

Abstract The question if the January 6, 2021, events at the US Capitol were an insurrection, a protest or something in between, is highly contentious, and the words someone uses to refer to those events may reveal a great deal about their political stances. The present paper performs a corpus-linguistic analysis in order to investigate how the two major US news outlets CNN and Fox News reported on the January 6 events. The corpus contains 633 articles from CNN and 847 from Fox News, all of which were written over a time span of 10 months, starting on January 6, 2021. The corpus analysis is preceded by a detailed analysis of each outlet’s position on the political spectrum and their respective audiences, both based on statistics from independent polling organizations.