Manipulative discursive constructions in British and Ukrainian reporting of the MH17 downing

Abstract

This article deals with manipulative discursive strategies used by the British BBC and Ukrainian TSN news broadcasters on their websites while reporting the incident of the MH17 downing over Ukraine on 17 July 2014. It was assumed that discursive manipulation would be different for the two countries, with the British maintaining a seemingly neutral position in reporting the tragic event, and the Ukrainians–more personally affected and therefore more biased–appearing more manipulative. The analysis methods applied included discursive, linguostylistic, and narratological approaches, as well as multimodal metaphor and metonymy, corpus, and CDA perspectives. The focus is on the social actors and the language of headlines, photo cuts related to them, and narratives. The BBC and TSN foreground some social agents involved in the MH17 tragedy and foreshadow others. The discursive strategies applied in the headlines reflect the ideological messages of the two countries and the broadcasters’ policies, as they focus on local representation, evinced by the vocabulary used and social actors mentioned, visual metaphors and metonymies at play. To create an intrigue matrix necessary for a successful narrative, the BBC offered stories in which the voices of victims are heard, while the TSN almost exclusively focused on official opinions. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.