FROM MANIPULATION TO AGGRESSION: ANALYSIS OF MEDIA DISCOURSE IN THE SITUATION OF INFORMATION CONFRONTATION

The paper analyses the functions of modern media in the situation of information confrontation. It shows that the media may play an increasingly destructive role exacerbating political conflicts between nations creating negative stereotypes of opponents and even demonizing them. Manipulation of public opinion, which has become an important function of the media, is getting more explicit and takes more aggressive forms. As aggression in the media discourse can be performed by both verbal and non-verbal means, we offer the term information (or media) aggression, which is broader than speech/linguistic aggression as it implies multimodality. We define distinctions between persuasion, manipulation and aggression showing that sometimes they can work together. Media aggression is viewed in our study in relation to the referent (affective aggression) and in relation to the audience (cognitive aggression). The purpose of this article is to prove that the growing media aggression is a feature of modern media discourse and this function can be analysed within the framework of manipulative discourse as manipulative persuasion. The data for the study was taken from leading quality American and British newspapers (The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times, The Economist), news sites of BBC and some others covering the relations between Russia and West. The study was conducted through critical discourse analysis developed by Fairclough [1], Fairclough and Wodak [2], van Dijk [3, 4], Wodak [5, 6], Weiss and Wodak [7] and others and multimodal approach [8, 9]. The results revealed various strategies and linguistic means of media manipulation and aggression. They also showed that in the atmosphere of information confrontation the function of information aggression is gaining momentum and can be viewed as manipulative persuasion. The knowledge of the strategies and linguistic means of manipulation is essential for the students of SL while reading, analysing and translating media texts.