AMBIGUITY AS A STRATEGY OF MANIPULATION

The purpose of the media nowadays is not just giving information but persuasion and manipulation (e.g. [1- 8] and others). The strategies and means of manipulation are getting more implicit and sophisticated. The aim of this paper is to show that ambiguity of the information has become one of widely used strategies of manipulation. Drawing on critical discourse analysis (CDA) [1, 9 -10] the study focuses on linguistic tools of uncertainty and their pragmatic function. The data have been taken from standard American and British newspapers, news websites of The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC, Reuters, The Guardian, among other media sources that cover the relations between Russia, the USA and the UK. The results show that the regular use of linguistic means (lexical, grammatical and syntactic) used to realise uncertainty in media serve to perform the strategy of ambiguity which in its turn is aimed at manipulation of public opinion. The study argues that the complex semantic, pragmatic and discursive analysis of the media text is important for understanding the implicit intention of its author and the goal of those who have power.