Media Framing of the Political Conflict between Russia and the UK: A case study of Scripals’ poisoning

Abstract

Since 2014 the political conflict between the Russian government and the EU including the UK has been gradually unfolding. One of the highest degrees of this conflict has been reached on March 4 (2018), when the Skripal family was poisoned in the territory of the UK. This has provided legitimacy to the UK government to publicise the political conflict between the two states via the mainstream media, whereby the political war was discursively displayed in all detail. This study aims at analysing how this conflict is represented linguistically, especially via metaphor use and micro-discourse strategies. For that purpose, sixty media publications were collected, thirty from the British media sources (i.e. BBC News, The Guardian, The Daily Mail) and thirty from the Russian media outlets (i.e. Ria-Novosti, Itar-tass, Interfax) by following the selection criteria of topicality (i.e. keywords Skripal/s, Skripals’ poisoning) and the time line (between March 4, 2018 and October 10, 2018). Procedurally, the collected data was analysed by combining critical discourse approach with a bottom-up approach to analysing metaphor, i.e. the linguistic instances of metaphor use were deconstructed into conceptual patterns or frames (Lakoff, Chilton, 1995; Lakoff, Johnson, 1999) that emerge in discourse through specific source domains and made narratively coherent by them (Musolff, 2016). The findings have demonstrated that despite the fact that both sides evoke different conflict scenarios, their narrative structure is based on such binary oppositions as Evil vs. Good, Oppressor vs. Victim, Enemy vs. Hero etc. This research has also shown how the political conflict between two governments can discursively develop into the ideological conflict between two nations by thus standardising the language of violence and aggression.