Browsing by Subject "Ukraine conflict"

This pro gradu thesis discusses the information war during the Ukraine conflict in 2014. In particular, it examines the production of enemy images in the Finnish and Russian online media articles. The role and significance of communication in national defense has increased significantly in recent years. In many aspects, information warfare has in fact returned to the core of modern warfare. The importance of conquering territory has lost its significance to operating in cyberspace. The term information war as understood in this thesis is characterized by the battle over information and the minds of people. The winner is therefore the one who creates the best narrative to support themselves and justify their action. After the escalation of the events in The Maidan demonstration in the center of the Ukrainian capital Kiev in November 2013, it soon became evident how Russia and the Western media both covered the conflict from remarkably different perspectives, all building their own narrative behind the events. This thesis focuses on two particular epochs in year 2014: the annexation of Crimea in March and the Russian aid convoy crossing the Ukraine border in August. The data consist of 64 randomly selected editorial articles from four media: Finnish public broadcasting company Yleisradio, Finnish tabloid newspaper Ilta-Sanomat, the Russian news channel Russia Today and the Russian news agency Sputnik International. This research focuses especially on the hidden power of media discourse (Norman Fairclough) and the main objective is the de-neutralization of the discourses of “the other” used in these media texts to represent “the other”. The method used for this study is the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), concentrating on role of language as being shaped by the society and shaping the society. CDA aims particularly at revealing the power relations behind discursive conventions. The main discourses found in this study were the discourses of military threat (1), truth (2), externality (3) and megalomania (4). The discourse of hypocrisy (5) solely appeared in the Russian media, whereas the discourse of despotism (6) was only used by the Finnish media. The prevalence of the four main discourses in the four media analyzed was surprisingly equal. However, there was more difference on a national level, as Ilta-Sanomat and Russia Today represented ”the other” clearly more actively with the help of these discourses compared to Yle and Sputnik. All in all, the representations of “the Other” in all the four media analyzed can be described as extremely negative.