Presuppositions in the Russian-Language and English-Language Mass Media

It is well known that mass media may distort information in different ways. This distortion affects the public perception of the world. Mass media can manipulate people, change their points of view, impose certain opinions, motivate actions or disencourage them. There are different ways of such manipulation in mass media. They include more direct strategies, such as propaganda, distortion or suppression of facts, logical fallacies etc., as well as subtle linguistic techniques of presenting information in a desirable way. My study focuses on linguistic ways of manipulating information and considers the role of presuppositions, implicatures, modality, referentiality in mass media. The paper is based on Russian-language and English-language media sources on the Internet. The aim of the research is to investigate different ways of presenting and manipulating information as occuring in different types of mass media. Our hypothesis is that different types of mass media employ different linguistic devices. In particular, we expect tabloid press to have the largest number of non-factual implicit meanings which aim to manipulate people's minds.