"Coming soon to a neighborhood near you...": The very real effects and great human costs of fake news : A critical discourse analysis of Breitbart News Network's representation of Muslim and Syrian refugees in the weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis is to analyze how a Breitbart News Network text represented Muslim and Syrian refugees in the weeks leading up to the 2016 United States presidential election. Using a methodological framework based on Norman Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis, the analysis seeks to reveal the linguistic semiotic choices made by the text producer in the representation of Muslim and Syrian refugees and to explain how these semiotic choices were used to achieve their effect. By revealing these linguistic semiotic choices, the beliefs, attitudes, and ideologies that are present in the text─ but not necessarily easily seen─ can be brought out into the open. Once out in the open, they can be critically questioned, contested,  and they can be examined to find out how their beliefs, attitudes, and ideologies can be understood to have destructive consequences on the audience and the groups of people they represent.