| Abstrakt: |
The purpose of research is to investigate information distortion linguistic means used by the printed and electronic media sources to manipulate the reader and form desirable by the addressee perception of reality. Among basic linguistic tools widely applied in mass media to shape the reader's attitude to certain concepts, events, figures etc.in the article are distinguished labelling (providing unjustified emotionally charged characteristics of an individual, event, notion, etc.), insider-outsider concept (reflecting the binary perception of the world, distinguishing among acknowledged, approved notions and those that appear as hostile, undesirable), euphemisms and dysphemism, representing words' substitution to create positive or neutral image of disparaging images. The following tools the article considers as manipulative and proves them to be applied by the media to embellish or denigrate reality and trigger certain attitude to the notion either endorsement, admiration or disapproval, contempt. The idea stated hasn't been previously studied thoroughly by the existent theories and proves the importance of the further investigation. The study is based on analysis of printed and electronic mass media sources of different socio-political nature: 'RG.RU' (official newspaper of Russian Government), 'Novaya gazeta' (oppositional newspaper), 'Izvestiya', 'Moskovsky Komsomolec' (independent sources). The choice of the material analyzed is determined by the wide use of the manipulative tools under study in political discourse, typical for the former newspapers. The total scope of data under investigation includes 150 articles providing 130145 examples. Methods of research included general scientific methods of observation, description, generalization with the elements of discursive contextual and content analysis of mass-media texts. The data was collected in accordance with continuous sampling method from each issue of newspaper under study. Various quantitative methods were applied in order to determine the frequency of manipulative techniques that might be used by the addressee to distort the reader's perception of the facts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
