Multimodal Construction of Fear And Sensationalism in Antifa Newsbites on FoxNews.com from 2017 to 2020

Newsbites (hyperlinked headlines accompanied by ledes or images) have become widely used by online news outlets to disseminate information to mass audiences. This paper adopts a critical discourse analytic framework using the Appraisal system to identify how interpersonal meanings are communicated in 240 headlines and ledes from FoxNews.com newsbites organized under the topic ‘Antifa’ during the first term of US President Donald Trump (2017–2020). We further demonstrate how multimodal features in thumbnail images accompanying these texts create meanings and construct sociopolitical ideologies in an online public formed by readers of these newsbites. Specifically, we find that images reflect and intensify meanings in texts of newsbites that gradually increase negative evaluation of Antifa-aligned individuals and those opposing the US political right. Furthermore, our analysis shows how FoxNews.com newsbites initially utilize images and text to represent Antifa as a protest group on university campuses in 2017 then use similar strategies to frame it as a lawless terror group in 2018–2020. By illustrating how highly graduated negative evaluations of people or behavior and images with ambiguous contexts work in tandem in newsbites to create fear appeals, this study contributes to scholarly understandings of how linguistic and multimodal features are used by online news media to attract audiences, perform pragmatic functions, and construct ideologies. Consequently, this study provides avenues for future research on how multimodal as well as linguistic affordances contribute to sensationalism in media coverage that targets socially disfavored groups.