DISCOURSE OF THREAT AS A STRATEGY OF EMOTIONAL PERSUASION AND MANIPULATION

The paper deals with the emotionalisation of contemporary media discourse, which is one of its important characteristics. It suggests that regular appeal to all sorts of threats (terrorist threat, military threat, ecological threat, Russian threat, Chinese threat, etc.), observed in media, evidences the emergence of a discourse of threat, which has an emotional impact on the audience, causes fear and anxiety in society. The study is limited to the notion of Russian threat. It explores the functioning of the word threat, its derivatives and synonyms in textual contexts with the focus on their pragma-discursive characteristics and functions. The material for the study was taken from newspaper articles, published in quality British and American newspapers in the period 2018-2019, which were analysed drawing on critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2001; Weiss & Wodak 2003, van Dijk 2006), medialinguistics (Bryant & Zillman 2002, Richardson 2007, Dobrosklonskaya 2008, Klushina 2014; Kopytowska 2009, 2015). The study argues that the frequent use of the collocation Russian threat as well as the obsessive discussion of this topic in the Western media is aimed at creating a negative image of Russia and influencing public opinion. The paper evidences that emotional impact has become more aggressive and should be considered as a strategy of manipulation widely used by contemporary media, as it suppresses the ability of rational perception of information and helps to introduce certain ideas into people's minds without critical thinking. We suggest that in a broad sense the discourse of threat itself may be considered as a strategy of manipulation