Mass Media’s Language Strategies to Assert Influence on the Audience (on the Example of Media Coverage of Peasant Protests in Modern China)
The importance of this research is explained by the fact that political potential of the mass media is largely determined by the effect of its linguistic methods on influencing the audience and China under the reform witnesses the increasing role of the mass media in changing the interaction model between the government and society. The purpose of the paper is to classify and characterize the language techniques of Chinese market-oriented mass media, which stimulate the public sympathy for rural protests. We use the method of frame analysis and linguistic discursive analysis to examine media coverage of five peasant protests cases in China (2005-2014). The main result of the study is as follows: Chinese market-oriented mass media from the perspective of sympathy cover peasant protests and create a media-image that shows the resistance of helpless farmers to unjust local government. That, in turn, prepares society to support protesters-peasants. The emotional-expressive stylistic devices (metaphors, emphasis on the dramatic nature of the event, etc.) allow the mass media to clearly describe the dissatisfaction of protesters and the intensity of confrontation, as well as logical rhetoric techniques (fragmentation, discussion of rumors, etc.) ensure the perception in society of some certain causal interpretation of the conflict in favor of the peasants. The author claims that the use of these language techniques, on the one hand, leads to a certain degree of distortion of the actual events in the public sphere, but on the other hand, increases the protesters' leverage on bargaining with local authorities over their own demands.