Moscow Protest Actions and Its Media Coverage: Comparative Analysis of Political Discourse

Student: Sivalneva Ekaterina

Supervisor: Yulia Mikhailovna Chanturidze

Educational Programme: Foreign Languages and Intercultural Communication (Bachelor)

Final Grade: 9

Year of Graduation: 2020

Discourse and society are inextricably intertwined. Social institutions simultaneously shape discourse and are shaped by it. Modern humans are greatly influenced by the most dominant social institutions and its byproducts: government and media, political and media discourse, respectively. Media has incredible control over information flow and the views of society. Over the years media hegemony has negatively impacted people’s critical thinking abilities as they are often unable to distinguish ‘fake’ news from objective information. One of the means of media gaining and maintaining control over humans is language. This paper explored the discursive patterns and strategies used by Russian-language and English-language digital news media outlets while describing the same political event. The content of the news articles was analyzed on the basis of fundamental approaches of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Drawing on the results of a statistical analysis this paper proposed a strategy of how to evaluate media discourse to avoid being manipulated. Keywords: critical discourse analysis, political discourse, media discourse

Full text (added May 13, 2020)

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