Political Media Images: Linguistic and Cognitive Aspects

Abstract

The paper focuses on linguistic and conceptual analysis of means of creating a politician’s image in the mass media discourse, special attention being paid to manipulation techniques. Mass media have turned into the main means of political discourse realization; they rank political issues in order of importance thus shaping political opinions. The research into media discourse has shown that the main manipulative tools used as means of political informational pressure by American mass media are metaphors, pejorative lexical units, illusions, phraseological units, sophistries, rhetorical questions, parallel constructions, imperative constructions, forms of addressing the reader with the help of personal pronouns, authority support, quotations, presupposition impositions, numerical data and pseudo statistics. Mass media interpret current events to their advantage and this interpretation is represented as a universal truth. Being under constant pressure of mass media, most