Zone-Flooding as a Discursive Strategy of Czech Anti-System News Portals

Abstract

The anti-system media (ANTS)—known for spreading disinformation—might seem to “flood [the media] zone” with a chaotic multitude of information: truths, untruths, and half-truths alike. The main goal of this study is to find evidence of systematicity in this seeming chaos: persistent and recurring narrative lines that run through the media class irrespective of the news topic. Two empirical methods (Keyword Analysis and Market Basket Analysis) are applied to large data from Czech online media (all articles, regardless of topic, from 40 ANTS web portals over three months in 2020). ANTS’ narratives are advanced by creating specific associations. The current approach is based on the idea that texts can be characterized with the help of conceptual associations, pursuing concepts which co-occur within the same text regardless of sentence or paragraph boundaries. This approach thus differs from the frequently-used strategy in discourse analysis of examining phenomena such as collocations, use of passive voice, or nominalization. The distinct properties of ANTS can be highlighted by contrasting it to the mainstream media class and to reader expectations in journalistic practice. The results, culled from servers including those not explicitly sponsored by the Kremlin, indicate that a schematic set of narrative lines permeate ANTS: a model of the world divided into the West (USA, NATO, and the EU) and Russia, in which the West has a negative image relative to that of Russia. These narrative lines lead to an argumentation for Czechia’s separation from the West (Czexit, leaving NATO) and for alignment with Russia.