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VYTAUTO DIDŽIOJO UNIVERSITETAS Miglė Musteikytė VYTAUTO DIDŽIOJO UNIVERSITETAS HUMANITARINIŲ MOKSLŲ FAKULTETAS UŽSIENIO KALBŲ, LITERATŪROS IR VERTIMO STUDIJŲ KATEDRA Miglė Musteikytė LIETUVOS VAIZDAVIMO RUSIJOS NAUJIENŲ PORTALE „RuBaltic.Ru“ TYRIMAS TEKSTYNŲ LINGVISTIKOS METODAIS Bakalauro baigiamasis darbas Anglų filologijos studijų programa, valstybinis kodas 612Q30004 Anglų filologijos studijų kryptis Vadovas (-ė) doc. dr. Jurgita Vaičenonienė _________ ___________ (parašas) (data) Apginta doc. dr. Rūta Eidukevičienė _________ ___________ (parašas) (data) Kaunas, 2020 REPRESENTATION OF LITHUANIA IN RUSSIAN NEWS PORTAL “RuBaltic.Ru”: A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS By Miglė Musteikytė Department of Foreign Language, Literary and Translation Studies Vytautas Magnus University Bachelor of Arts Thesis Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Jurgita Vaičenonienė 3 June 2020 SANTRAUKA Dezinformacijai internete augant, gebėjimas atpažinti propagandą bei netikrą informaciją tapo naudingu įrankiu. Šis darbas skirtas išnagrinėti su Lietuva susijusios propagandos atvejus naujienų portale „RuBaltic.Ru“. Tyrimo tikslas - išanalizuoti Lietuvos įvaizdžiui kurti naudojamas kalbos vartojimo ypatybes. Pagrindiniai darbo uždaviniai - nustatyti lingvistines struktūras ir diskurso aspektus naudojamus propagandiniams bei ideologiniams tekstams kurti. Tikslui pasiekti, tekstai buvo analizuojami kelias skirtingais skerspjūviais. Analizė atlikta remiantis 38 straipsniais publikuotais naujienų portale „RuBaltic.Ru“ nuo 2013 iki 2018 metų. Duomenys buvo analizuojami tiek kokybiniu tiek kiekybiniu požiūriais. Kritinė diskurso analizė padėjo nustatyti, kaip kalba yra naudojama siekiant perteikti tam tikrą informaciją. Tekstynų lingvistikos metodai ir tekstų analizavimo įrankis Voyant Tool padėjo nustatyti tam tikrų žodžių dažnį bei temas, dažniausiai naudojamas skleisti propagandos turinį. Analizės rezultatai parodė, kad naratyvas yra formuojamas supriešinant faktus apie Lietuvą ir faktus apie Rusiją. Portalo autoriai kuria Lietuvos įvaizdį pasitelkdami ideologijas – Lietuva yra vaizduojama kaip agresyvi, tačiau silpna valstybė, kuri valdoma diktatūrinio režimo principais. Taip pat buvo nustatyta, kad ideologiniai tekstai kuriami naudojant įvairias lingvistines bei retorines struktūras – prielaidas, užuominas bei metaforas, kurios kuria neigiamą Lietuvos įvaizdį. Tyrime padaryta išvada, kad propagandos diskurse faktai dažniausiai pateikiami netiesiogiai, nes autoriai, kurie geba subtiliai pateikti neigiamas Lietuvos savybes, yra publikuojami dažniau nei kiti. i SUMMARY Russia and Lithuania have been fighting for power for extended period of time. As disinformation on the Internet keeps growing, the ability to identify propaganda and fake information in texts is becoming especially relevant. This thesis concentrates on the analysis of Lithuania-related Russian propaganda in news portal “RuBaltic.Ru”. The aim of the thesis is to analyze the way news portal “RuBaltic.Ru” uses language to represent Lithuania. For this reason, the main objectives are to determine linguistic structures and discourse aspects used to create propaganda and ideologically controlled texts. In order to achieve the goal, the texts were analyzed from several different perspectives. For the present analysis, 38 articles from 2013 to 2018 were collected from “RuBaltic.Ru” news website. The data was analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. To determine the manner in which language is used for the purpose of sustaining dominance, the methods of critical discourse analysis were applied. The methods of corpus linguistics and Voyant Tool software were used for text analysis and to learn the frequency of certain nodes as well as identify the most common themes for spreading propaganda. The conducted analysis suggests that the narrative is shaped by polarizing Lithuania and Russia-related facts. The authors use ideologies to represent Lithuania as an aggressive yet week country that is ruled under dictatorship. It was determined that propaganda helps to gain power as well as control and provide best results when used implicitly since ideologically controlled articles are created by employing various linguistic and rhetorical features, such as presuppositions, implications and negative metaphors that help to portray Lithuania in an unfavorable manner. The conclusion is that, in propaganda discourse, facts are usually presented indirectly as the authors, who manage to implicitly discuss negative characteristics of Lithuania, are published more frequently. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS SANTRAUKA ..................................................................................................................................... i SUMMARY ........................................................................................................................................ ii LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES .................................................................................................. iv 1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................ 1 2 DEFINING APPROACHES TO ANALYZING DISCOURSE .................................................. 3 2.1 The concept of discourse analysis ............................................................................................. 3 2.2 Critical discourse analysis.......................................................................................................... 4 2.2.1 Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework ........................................................................ 4 2.2.2 Language and power ........................................................................................................... 5 2.2.3 Language and ideology ....................................................................................................... 6 2.3 Media discourse ......................................................................................................................... 7 2.4 Political discourse ...................................................................................................................... 8 2.5 Propaganda discourse................................................................................................................. 9 3 ANALYSIS OF RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA IN “RuBaltic.Ru” NEWS PORTAL ................. 12 3.1 Data and methods ..................................................................................................................... 12 3.2 Representation of Lithuania vs. Russia in news headlines ...................................................... 13 3.3 Representation of Lithuania vs. Russia in news articles .......................................................... 15 3.3.1 Representation of Lithuania (Them) .................................................................................. 15 3.3.2 Representation of Russia (Us) ........................................................................................... 17 3.4 Characteristics of Russian propaganda in news articles .......................................................... 18 3.5 Themes of Russian propaganda in news articles ..................................................................... 23 4 CONCLUSIONS ........................................................................................................................ 31 REFERENCES .................................................................................................................................. 33 APPENDIX A. Lithuania and Russia-related evaluative statements ................................................ 35 APPENDIX B. Reporters’ full names ............................................................................................... 43 APPENDIX C. The corpus ................................................................................................................ 44 iii LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Table 1. Corpus statistics ................................................................................................................... 12 Table 2. Sub-corpus statistics ............................................................................................................ 13 Figure 1. Discourse as text, interaction and context (Fairclough 25) .................................................. 5 Figure 2. Frequency of referent regions in headlines ........................................................................ 13 Figure 3. Explicit references to Lithuania and Russia ....................................................................... 15 Figure 4. Frequency of recurrent reporters. ....................................................................................... 19 Figure 5. Recurrent themes in the articles ......................................................................................... 23 iv 1 INTRODUCTION Propaganda and information warfare are not new concepts, but their relevance has increased due to the growth of media outlets online. With the increase of media power, it has become quite difficult to understand which published information is true and which is not. The phenomenon of ideology and power in the media has also received a lot of attention from the acknowledged scholars (Walton 2007; Van Dijk 2008; Wodak 2011). In Lithuania, previous research on propaganda explored its characteristics and the content as a whole. There are studies that suggested research models for analyzing propaganda (Buinauskas et al. 2016), analyzed hostility (Kasčiūnas 2018; Keršanskas 2016) and
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