Media coverage of current political situation in Ukraine: Discourse analysis

Abstract

The research looks at the manipulation in political media discourse. The purpose is to investigate media coverage of current political situation in Ukraine by analyzing Western and Russian articles from such sources as ‘the Russia Today’, ‘the Washington Post’, ‘The New York Times’, ‘The Daily Mail’ etc. In the present study we have based on the T.A. van Dijk’s theory and we have done contextual and textual discourse analysis of the chosen articles. The analysis has shown that journalists tend to use the strategy of negative other-presentation with the help of lexical units with negative connotation. Moreover, they use the means of coreference to put all and the same referents in a favorable or unfavorable light. It is also noticed that often Russian media try to represent the Ukrainian army as ‘violent extremist organizations’, ‘pro-Nazis’ or ‘ fascists’. The Western articles are full of military terminology because it helps to create a negative and aggressive image of Russia. In other words, the study reveals links between a country’s ideology and the media coverage of internationally important events all over the world.