The Existence of Phraseological Units of Journalistic Deception in the Russian Pre-Revolutionary Press

Abstract

Fake (false) news today has a global scale. Unfortunately, this fact confi rms the relevance of this study. The word fake is constantly found in modern media, but earlier phraseological units of deception were more common. The article examines the genesis of phraseological units of journalistic deception in the domestic pre-revolutionary press. The author reviewed about 40 periodicals of the Russian Empire, dictionaries, fi ction and ego-documents. The purpose of the study is to form a picture of hostility towards journalistic deception, phraseologically fi xed at the verbal and visual level of Russian periodicals of the 19th – early 20th centuries. Among the many European and domestic studies of phraseological units of journalistic lies, scientists paid almost no attention to the visual context. This article partially fi lls this gap. Illustrated publications of the 1860s–1880s were especially carefully reviewed to identify early visual images associated with phraseological units of journalistic lies. The research is based on the principles of historicism and systematicity; the methodology of the history of concepts and the history of images was used. During a continuous and selective review of Russian pre-revolutionary periodicals, 38 verbal examples of the use of phraseological units of journalistic deception and 69 visual examples were identifi ed. The most common are the word pouf and the phraseological unit newspaper hoax, much less often magazine hoax, literary hoax, political hoax, etc. The word pouf in the context of deception appeared in Russian journalism from the late 1830s and began to be widely used in the 1840s. The phraseological unit newspaper hoax entered the Russian language in the late 1850s, since the 1860s it had become understandable to most readers and was actively used by the domestic press throughout the pre-revolutionary period. Among the most desirable prospects for this research should be the identifi cation of phraseological units of journalistic deception in Russian periodicals of the early twentieth century. In this case, special attention should be paid to the poorly studied visual area. Keywords: Russian pre-revolutionary journalism, phraseology, journalistic deception, fake, pouf, newspaper hoax