Criticism of media speech in the “Literary Irkutsk” in the era of perestroika: Subjects, directions, methods of introduction to publications

Abstract

The article discusses groups of subjects of media speech criticism of the Irkutsk writers organization’s newspaper “Literary Irkutsk” of the late 80s — early 90s in the twentieth century. It is proposed to classify writers, poets, and playwrights as subjects of criticism of media speech, along with representatives of the academic sphere, employees of media organizations, and public activists. The expansion of the group of critics of media speech is justified by multiple objective and subjective reasons. Groups of media speech critics are structured into two communities — professional and non-professional communicators. The main areas of criticism of media speech in the corporate publications are identified. It has been established that effective aspects of publications (media rhetoric) are relevant if they criticize excessive or insufficient expression of texts, rhetorical arguments of logos and pathos, unfair work with illustrative and factual material, and manipulative tactics. The criticism of media speech acquires a resource and situational-speech perspective (stylistics of media speech) while analyzing stylistic violations in the media, analyzing extralinguistic factors that influenced the individual style of media authors, and when describing ideological prohibitions on the stylistic use of language options. Linguistic-legal and linguistic-ethical aspects of criticism (linguoconflictology) involve an analysis of the speech “abuses” of media from the standpoint of ethics and law. The specificity of the inclusion of critical comments of various sizes in different structural and compositional parts of the materials of “Literary Irkutsk” is shown. Three methods are presented — “point”, “fragmentary”, and “text” — the introduction of media speech criticism into problematic articles, op-ed articles, readers’ letters, rebuttals, and commentary from “Literary Irkutsk”.