earticle

영어

The ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine increases concerns around the world. Russian President Vladimir Putin attacked Ukraine, with a clear aim to protect ethnic Russians from Ukraine, and further to keep Ukraine from joining NATO. However, as the war takes longer than expected, Russia is getting more isolated from the world. Given this, we analyzed editorials from the New York Times by paying attention to the newspaper’s viewpoint or ideological stance to the war, under van Dijk (1998)’s ideological square within the framework of critical discourse analysis. The analysis results are as follows: first, Ukraine, the United States and the Europe were designated as the ingroup, whereas Putin was as its outgroup; second, the editorials used negative words for their outgroup presentation, highlighting the outgroup’s bad properties, while the positive words for their ingroup presentations were rarely used, indicating that the editorials reinforce outgroup exclusion only; third, it was only Russian President Vladimir Putin who was in their outgroup, while Russians were depicted as scapegoats to satisfy the pleasures of the maniacal Putin. Thus, it can be concluded that with the strategy of negative exclusion, the editorials clearly show their negative ideology towards the war by using negative words for the outgroup almost six times as often as positive words for the ingroup.