Manipulative discourse and the mechanisms of its modeling

Abstract

The article examines modern media discourse in a manipulative aspect as a translator of a new reality. The research materials were polycode texts as carriers of a complex type of coded information (news segment, social advertising), collected by continuous sampling and dedicated to the global eventuality – the COVID-19 pandemic. The study revealed that the modeling of the leading attitudes of the ideology of power, the formation and broadcasting of a new moral and cognitive paradigm, the corresponding behavioral models in media discourse is carried out using a conflict-generating (manipulative) strategy and a number of tactics (fragmentation, generalization, hyperbolization, silence, repression, unity etc.), explicated at the pragmatic level, as well as with the help of linguistic resources. In the process of modeling the principles of the leading ideology (the concept of power), the alternative discourse remains outside the framework of the official mass media (broadband information space) and is pushed into the digital virtual space of the media environment. As a result of the interpretation of the collected material, it turned out that the following are becoming the leading mechanisms for modeling power discourse: implicit - presupposition (creating a false presupposition against which tactics are used), the interference of different semiotic codes, as well as reformatting the content of the conceptual opposition, one's own – someone else's; explicit – means of metagraphics (punctuation marks, font, size, color design, location of informative fragments) and linguistic resources proper (precedent phenomena, conceptual metaphor, nature of subject nomination, etc.).