Abstract
The article aims to account for the impact of explicit political propaganda by way of divulging the cognitive mechanisms of its main tools. This is a case study of 600 fake news narratives about the political and military crisis in and around Ukraine in 2015-2018 enlisted and analyzed as such on the website EU versus Disinfo. In the analysis, I depart from the basic principles of cognitive linguistics and consider the tools of explicit propaganda divided accordingly. The rationale of the first and the second groups of tools is a balance of the logical (like joint attention) and the emotional in human perception. The third group of tools explores the pivotal role of language (in particular, its lexical units and conceptual structures as their underpinning) in construing the world. Considering the third group of tools, I also pinpoint various semiotic codes (verbal and visual) in their combination as a factor that has a great potential for influencing human cognition.
Highlights
The era of post-truth politics (Biesecker, 2018), boosted the use of all possible means of manipulating audience’s opinions and behavior
I depart from the basic principles of cognitive linguistics and consider the tools of explicit propaganda divided
As an intermediate bottom line, the means featured in this subclause, present the explicit propaganda tools that transform the nature of the anchor of joint attention by way of suggesting false analogy with it, re-scaling the value of events rendered by the anchor, or creating the illusion of local absence of alternative featuring the anchor as an ultimate solution of the problem
Summary
The era of post-truth politics (Biesecker, 2018), boosted the use of all possible means of manipulating audience’s opinions and behavior. Deploying propaganda as its main and efficient device, post-truth politics explores the regulative potential of mass media. In their various communicative formats ranging from footage to simple rumors, they tend to render lapidary messages that media provide as commonly acknowledged facts (truth) or first-hand evidence. In spite of recurrent attempts to register, enlist and disclose them as fakes, these messages still sustain. This obviously suggests that such messages have a powerful impact
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