Mythopoesis as a Discursive Tool of Russian Information War on Rt

The present paper explores the discursive means of creating ideologically biased myth-making narratives on the Russian state-owned media channel RT, formerly Russia Today. The basis for the paper is 22 news stories collected from RT’s English-language webcasting service within four days in February 2025. The research is carried out within the framework of CDA of the textual level of RT’s coverage, with the most typical cases exemplified in the cited excerpts. The research relies on the works of scholars dedicated to CDA analysis of news discourse. Based on the present corpus, several journalistic aspects of myth-making discourse on RT have been singled out. Along these thematic layers, the accompanying discursive techniques that facilitate the myth-making on RT are uncovered and analyzed. This article investigates the corpus for the evidence of a biased and distorted linguistic representation of the political tensions between Russia and the West, and the Russo-Ukrainian war in particular. It also focuses on uncovering the more illicit techniques of myth-making through CDA research and identifies the cases where linguistic discursive means are employed to render the ideological bias. Similar research is scarce in the case of RT, which makes the present article another contribution into the uncovering of propagandistic techniques of news providers. Keywords: mythopoesis, RT, propaganda, CDA, ideology, media bias, the Russo-Ukrainian war

Critical discourse analysis · Discourse analysis · Focalization · Ideology · Narrative · Politics · Discourse Analysis and Cultural Communication · Education, Literature, Philosophy Research · Language, Communication, and Linguistic Studies