Legitimization Mechanisms in the Media Discourse (A Case Study of the New Media)

Abstract

Purpose. Today, new media play a crucial role in legitimating political relations. Theoretical background of the current research draws on the social cognitive approach to discourse studies. From this perspective, legitimization is understood as one of the major ways of establishing social dominance in the process of meaning negotiation. As the meanings in discourse can vary, discourse actors have tools to attribute components of meaning to specific affairs, for instance, political and social. An analysis of the news discourse aims to identify major mechanisms of establishing legitimacy of political decisions conducted by political institutions. The authors describe discursive features of constructing political decisions by applying the method of discourse analysis to the news on Venezuelan crisis, which took place in the winter 2018-2019. Results. As the study of the empirical data demonstrates, the British mass media tend to construct discursive representation of Latin America’s events by introducing of several groups of actors in the news on the Venezuelan crisis. Generally, these groups relate to socio-political hierarchy. They include individual, collective, institutional and international actors. By tracing the elements of their agency in Venezuelan crisis 2019 news, authors assume that their functions in news construction are directly connected to the mechanism of objectivation. Recognizing the informative function of media as one of the major, authors argue that this mechanism also relates to establishing legitimacy in discursive practices. The ways by which the actors of the events in the discourse on Venezuela have been embedded in the articles show the creation of increasingly formed belief in legitimate actions of the new opposition leader. Conclusion. The study contributes to the methods of discourse analysis as well as to the search for legitimization strategies applied by the media. The implications of the study include the comparative analysis of British and Russian new media discourse.