From News to Disinformation: Unpacking a Parasitic Discursive Practice of Czech Pro-Kremlin Media

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines a “parasitic discourse behavior,” a strategy used by the Czech antisystem media. A working hypothesis about the nature of parasitization was drawn from close reading: the antisystem media, while creating a false impression of mainstream journalism, attempt to reframe events with a set of recurrent associations. This hypothesis was tested with a combination of three quantitative methods: (1) Keyword analysis for identification of prominent topics, which are further analyzed by (2) Companions and (3) Market Basket Analysis (MBA). Companions, a new method comparing occurrences of keywords in time, reveals antisystem’s imitation of the mainstream, and MBA shows its production of distinct associations to frame trendy news items. As a proof of concept, four instances of parasitization were identified during May–August 2020 – topics that attracted public attention for a sufficiently long timespan to come under the radar of our methods: Belarus presidential elections, followed by brutality on the protesters, the police killing of George Floyd in the US, and the subsequent events against systemic racism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the dispute over the WWII monuments in the Czech Republic. Associations accompanying all these topics weave a set of consistent narratives: anti-West, pro-Kremlin, and a strong anti-Ukrainian stance.