Legal Analytics in Mass Media: Strategies and Tactics

Abstract

The development of information technologies contributes to an increase in the number of areas where the intersection of media and social phenomena and thus the media discourse with other institutional discourses takes place. The heterogeneous discourses resulting from these processes are characterized by a specific goal and strategic and tactical apparatus, which is of particular interest in terms of discourse studies. The article aims to identify the main communicative goals, strategies and tactics in the genre of analytical article on legal issues. The study uses the texts of English-language analytical articles on legal issues published in electronic versions of the following daily editions: The Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post in the period 2015–2022. The authors use philosophical, general scientific, as well as special methods and techniques: dialectical, empirical methods, description, induction, deduction, analysis, synthesis, methods of discursive and contextual analysis. The researchers identify the value dominant of the genre, which determines the goal and strategic and tactical characteristics of the analytical article on legal issues: elite legal awareness formation. In accordance with the value dominant, the main communicative goals of the genre are defined and described (informing, explaining, influencing and developing the recipient’s heuristic potential). The paper presents a general communicative media analytical strategy, which includes a set of principles involved in the implementation of this strategy (analyticity, reliability, persuasiveness, striving for objectivity, accessibility, individuality, multimediality, heuristics. The authors describe the strategic principles and provide the analysis of the communicative tactics used by the addressees in combination with the communicative goals of the genre and the media analytical strategy principles.