Ideological Prejudice in Selected Political Speeches: A Critical Pragmatic Study

Abstract

One of the most significant language uses typically invested in many social contexts, especially by in-group speech communities, is ideological prejudice. An Identification of a knowledge gap, this paper analyses the biased reporting of the American and Chinese tensions surrounding the human rights violations and prejudices on March 14, 2019, via the lens of critical pragmatic theory. One article has been selected from Fox news media to analyze the accusations between the American foreign minister Mark Pompeo and the Chinese equivalent Ku Lang. Channels, social media, and blogs all use text and context to write prejudice and ideology; this study aims to reveal the components and function of prejudice by analyzing the argumentative approaches that allow this event to occur. The researcher employed a pragmatic and critical discourse analysis framework together with a mixed-methods approach to achieve a thorough understanding of the nature of prejudice present in the selected data. The analysis shows that the cognitive, affective, and behavioral elements, reflecting attitudes toward the dissemination of prejudiced content in the chosen articles, are manifested through semantic strategies such as lexicalization and aggregation, along with rhetorical strategies including topos and contrast. This study has determined that discourse has influence in a culture characterized by prejudice.