№ 4 - 2006
Trakhtenberg A.D.
Discourse-Analysis of Mass Communication and Paradoxes of Leftist Consciousness

The motif of the article is criticism of modern approaches to discourse-analysis of mass communication. The author demonstrates that in carrying out discourse-analysis of mass media, either too small-scale, or too large-scale vision is applied, and, as a result, instead of mass media being researched as a political, social and cultural phenomenon, we get either a series of "examples" of how media practise naturalization of ideology and operate with the dominant discourse, or an aggregate picture of the "discursive totality" in which mass media are but one of the elements of the context. According to the author's conclusion, it is "small-scale" vision that dominates modern studies of communication, which brings about anarchism in the view of the subject, with, in the meantime, full methodological consensus available, that exactly happens to serve as the main criterion of a given analytical procedure's correctness and of truthfulness of the results obtained.