Description
In autumn 2019, Pro-Kremlin news sites showed a rising trend of publishing controversial content about Youth Strike for Climate and especially about climate change activist Greta Thunberg. For example, RT circulated the idea that global warming is a Russophobic hoax, Fridays for Future is not genuine grassroots protest movement and it actually serves the interests on globalist elite, and the intensified public discussion on climate change is a smokescreen for hiding some military maneuvers of the Western forces. It is noteworthy that Russia’s own policy on the subject is not in accordance with those narratives, in September 2019 Russia formalized its participation in the Paris Agreement in. The goal of this paper is to analyse how RT - the major media outlet financed by the Russian government - depicted the youth climate strikes and to explain which strategic aims it potentially served. Our conceptual and explanatory framework is based on the theory of strategic narrative (Miskimmon et. al 2013, 2017) and concept of affective community (Hutchison 2016). The secondary purpose of the study is to enrich the analytical toolbox of strategic narratives with concepts, originating from semiotics and transmedia storytelling. Transmedia storytelling is a process where different story-entries get dispersed systematically across various platforms for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated narrative experience. We analyse 50 news entries (that include textual, visual and audiovisual content) and rely on interpretative method that combines narrative analysis and multimodal discourse analysis.
