The Structure of a PROTESTas a Mass-Media Concept: Modern Discursive Practices

Abstract

The article draws on the data gathered from Russian media-political discourse and presents the model a “protest” as a mass-media concept. The cognitive and discursive analysis of media reports on civil protests during the elections to Moscow City Duma in 2019 (on the website www.aif.ru) allows to nuance the conceptual structure of protests in the worldview of modern Russian society and to reveal the trends in the concept dynamics from the standpoint of ideology and meaning. The article defines dominant psycholinguistic scenarios and intent models, the specificity of discursive practices of Russian political protests, intentions and style of journalists, and tools employed to generate a specific communicative impact on the audience. In the texts published on the website www.aif.ru, the negative image of a protesting opposition activist is created through the use of the dominant scenario “Deception” in combination with “Planning / Intention” and “Lack of propriety”. The intent group “Us” is assessed positively (self-representation), less often neutrally (information), while the intensity of the negative assessment of the group “Them” (“strangers”) increased as the protests progressed (from “criticism” to “accusation” and subsequently to “exposure”). The primary communicative strategies for presenting protesters are the strategies of attacks on reputation and diminishing credibility.