The gendered aspects of disinformation in the Russian state-aligned news media

The case of the Mariupol maternity hospital bombing during Russia’s full scale invasion in Ukraine. Higher Seminar in Media and Communication Studies with Valentina Shapovalova, PhD Fellow at the University of Copehagen (hybrid)

On March 9th 2022 the maternity and children’s hospital number three in Mariupol, Ukraine, was hit by a Russian airstrike, as part of Russia’s full-scale war efforts in Ukraine (OSCE, 2022). However, the Russian state-aligned media promoted a different narrative: namely, that the bombing itself as well as the victims on site were fake, thus shaping the event to fit within the discursive information warfare structure. Combining concerns of war, gender, and disinformation in the news, I analytically unfold the pro-Kremlin Russian media coverage of the Mariupol case within the methodological framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1992), in a piece that is to be part of my PhD monograph. The analysis contains different foci points. Firstly, it is the representation of the female victim(s), as well as the different elements of the politically framed, hegemonic discourses of masculinity (Krijnen & Bauwel, 2021) that this case is shaped by. Across the material, female agents who would traditionally be presented as victims are stripped of victimhood and symbolically erased (Harvey, 2020). Meanwhile, the experts in the coverage are solely male and predominantly Russian, pointing to an intersectional and unequal divide based on gender and nationality. Secondly, it shows how fact-checking is used as a deliberate tool within the discourse of information warfare in the Russian state-aligned media. In this case gender again plays a role as those who are rendered believable (Bennet-Weiser and Higgins, 2022) in the coverage are male. Thirdly, the analysis explores the relationship between disinformation and news in the current domestic context of authoritarian media control in Russia (Dobek-Ostrowska, 2015; Oates, 2016).

Valentyna Shapovalova is a PhD Fellow in the Media Studies section of the Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen. Her project is a theoretical and empirical exploration of the gendered discourses in the Russian state-aligned media, with the focus being on propaganda and disinformation within the current context of Russia’s full scale war in Ukraine. Valentyna’s main research interests include Russian disinformation and propaganda; modern information warfare; feminist media studies; non-democratic media systems; and critical discourse analysis.

It will be possible to participate in the seminar both live on campus or digitally via Zoom. For more information, please contact Saga Hansén (details below).