Civic Position in Op-Eds: Genre and Stylistic Expression in Modern Media

Mass media inform people about the most important social, cultural, and political processes. However, news coverage is seldom objective and unbiased. The way mass media assess social events influences public opinions and attitudes. The article describes op-eds, namely the genre-dependent and stylistic devices that journalists use to express their civic position. Based on the anthropocentrism of modern media linguistics, the research involved previously understudied materials and subjects, i.e., linguistic tools used by opinion writers to bring their political views to the reader. The sample consisted of 90 op-eds in the series of Dmitry Popov Weekly published in Moskovskiy Komsomolets in 2021–2024. The op-eds touched upon complex issues, encouraging the readers to think and develop values that make a responsible citizen. The journalist sees the reader as a like-minded patriot and a reflecting personality. Dmitry Popov expresses his attitude to the events indirectly, via allusions, meta-commentaries, hypophoras, rhetorical questions, irony, etc. Dmitry Popov Weekly is a genroid that combines a news report, an analytical review, an essay, a feuilleton, a set of tips, and a forecast. Irony proved to be the most popular device used to cover domestic and foreign political events. Strating with the headline down, irony is realized in the text through speech, stylistic, and graphic means, i.e., tropes, euphemisms, stylistic contamination, quotation marks, etc. When applied to political opponents and politicians with anti-Russian views, it borders on sarcasm and mockery. The sarcastic and mocking tone is supported by blunt metaphors, occasionalisms, and evaluative labelling