A Look at Brexit by RT, a Russian News Source

Abstract

This article is a corpus-assisted discourse study of a medium-sized corpus of journalistic content collected from the Russian-language branch of RT, a Russian government-sponsored news source. A corpus of over 380,000 tokens was collected from online world news reports, business analyses, opinion pieces, culture, science, and sport news reporting containing the word ‘Brexit.’ It touches on the presentation of Brexit itself, its technical aspects, main actors, the UK and the EU, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and other politicians, and such issues of contention as the situation in Scotland and Northern Ireland, the economy, and migration. Reporting seems fairly shallow: the technicalities of Brexit are mentioned very frequently, but they do not receive much discussion or explanation. RT’s commentary relies heavily on quoting politicians or interviewing experts, which may be caused by a lack of first-hand experience with the topic, by respect for expert opinion, or by a desire to improve the network’s negative reputation by appeals to professionalism.