Knowledge management in news discourse: a socio-cognitive view

The article considers news discourse as one of the leading genres of the media sphere, of particular concern is the issue of ideologically biased news reports. It focuses on how ideology and knowledge are managed in news discourse production and comprehension. The theoretical perspective of the paper is the critical epistemic discourse analysis proposed by T.A. van Dijk. The paper considers mental representation of the event nominated in British and American mass media as “Russian spy poisoning”. The author offers the issue that knowledge may be relative to the members and the criteria of different epistemic communities, and one of the strategies of persuasion is to define beliefs as knowledge of facts. The paper reveals the communicative function and pragmatic potential ofepistemic modalityand evidentiality in the ideological control of news discourse. It is argued that evidentials do not always come alone but may be part of complex evidential strategies. The author claims that the evidence-epistemic markers with the semantics of knowledge / possibility / probability / likelihood in mental representation of the event “Russian spy poisoning” aim at manipulating and misleading the addressee. The article is an initial step toward analyzing the role of knowledge and beliefs in the formation of mental event models in ideologically based news discourse.