From Courtroom to Newsroom: Linguistic Framing of Donald Trump's Trial in Legal and Media Discourse

Abstract

This paper investigates the linguistic framing of U.S. President Donald Trump's trial in two distinctive discourse settings: courtrooms and media. The paper employs a qualitative method manifested in two analytical strands, linguistic framing and critical discourse analysis, to analyze the transformation in the legal discursive practice mediated by the news narrative. The main objective of the paper is to highlight the differences between the discursive practice in courtroom transcripts and its transformation in the news coverage to expose the differences in the use of lexicalization, agency, and modality, which mirrors the reciprocal connection between the micro-linguistic realization of meaning and the macro-level power structures that shape the public interpretation of Trump’s trial. The analysis shows that while legal discursive practices are primarily procedural and authoritative, news discursive practices are strategically personalized to background and foreground the actors’ agency. The paper has three findings: first, courtroom discourse is represented by procedural lexicalization, modal caution, reduced emotive expressions, and common backgrounding through passivation and/or nominalization, which contributes to maintaining institutional objectivity. Second, media discourse is characterized by value-loaded lexicalization, increased use of modality, agency activation, and the strategic deployment of emotive lexis, which enables the construction of the criminal trial as ideologically political. Third, the shift from courtroom to newsroom is not only a shift in genre but also a site of ideological struggle where legal authority, political power, and public opinion intersect and also demonstrates the power of linguistic framing in mediating legal events for the public.