THE PROBLEM OF IDENTIFYING A PROPAGANDA NARRATIVE IN THE MODERN GERMAN PRINTED PRESS

Abstract

The article presents an attempt at a new interpretation of the basic concepts of narrative, propaganda, ideology, manipulative technologies and hybrid information warfare, in the context of their changes over the past 3 years, from the point of view of linguistics and media science in general. The subject of consideration was the contextual and idiomatic verbalization of the media image of Ukraine and the Russian-Ukrainian war, starting from 2014, in the German periodicals “Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, “Die Tageszeitung” and “Der Spiegel”. Particular attention was paid to the potential possibilities and actual verbal means of manipulating the readership to create a distorted image of reality. Based on the material of German press sources from 2014–2022, the evolution of the aggressor’s propaganda narratives is analyzed, in the time period from the beginning of the Russian invasion in 2014 to the beginning of a full-scale war of aggression in 2022. To this purpose, frequently used motives, images, clichés, precedent text allusion and media stereotypes of Ukraine, which are presented in the analyzed press sources, are identified. Their classification into explicit and implicit is proposed, with the help of quantitative and content analysis the marginalization of the former and qualitative changes in the latter are illustrated. Particularly stable and consensual implicit propaganda narratives are identified, which retain a high degree of use in the German media, despite facts and historical events, due to the inertia of use, selfcensorship and tabooing of word usage. Typical difficulties in identifying a manipulative propaganda narrative, especially an implicit one, with blind use and imitation of adherence to the standards of freedom of speech and journalistic impartiality, have been identified. The main factor in the stability of a propaganda narrative is the ability to euphemize, indirect nomination, and inflationary frequency of use. The emergence of new, more sophisticated narratives of indirect action is predicted and the need for their further study is substantiated.