HATE SPEECH MANIFISTATIONS IN BRITISH ONLINE MEDIA “DAILY MAIL”

Thearticle is devoted to the analysis of hate speech manifestations in British online mass media based on case of the tabloid Mail Online (national newspaper Daily Mail’s web site).There have been defined and classified the lexical markers of hate speech. Although there are multiple definitions of the phenomenon provided by authors from different disciplines, hate speech remains one of the hot subjects of research in sociolinguistics and media studies. Its main feature is negative representation of all kinds of minorities (ethnic, racial, gender etc.), migrants, refugees, internally displaced persons, women, and any other social groups, which are not in mainstream social positions. Media discourse is being dehumanized and weaponized by usage of verbal aggression, which is seen as a social condition for committing hate crimes. In this paper, the author discusses the linguistic ways of creating of hate speech objects’negative images, in particular hate speech based on religious intolerance towards Muslims. Critical analysis of British media discourse showed that over past ten years the islamophobic rhetoric is widely present in UK press, especially in sensational mass tabloids like Daily Mail. The pool of analyzed texts proved that Muslims are often associated with criminals, terrorists, extremists, killers, less educated and unwilling to work, aggressive and dangerouspeople. Linguistic tools for creating such imagesare investigated in the article. First, using nouns and adjectives with highly negative connotations for describing Muslims. Second, using narrative styles for splitting society into ‘ingroups’ and ‘outgroups’ (so called ‘WE-groups’ and ‘THEY-groups’) by comparing and contrasting in sentence and word structures, where ‘we-group’ is always positive and ‘outgroup’ – negative. Third, using suggestive manipulative techniques for creating negative associations: rhetoric questions for imposing certain answers and highly emotional words-labels. The paper provides examples of hate speech manifestations and opens ground for further research of current infodemia caused by Covid-19 pandemic, which is being used for growing hate speech practices worldwide, especially in English-language online media as those with multimillion readership and geopolitical power.