Gender Stereotypes in Online News Headlines: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Online News Headlines Around the Case of Ksenia Sobchak

This thesis is a critical analysis of the discourses used in online news headlines to report \ntwo events that took place during 2018 Russian Presidential debates (on February 14, \n2018 and March 14, 2018) and focused on Ksenia Sobchak, the only female presidential \ncandidate of the 2018 election. By analyzing 52 headlines published in Russia’s most \npopular and most read online news outlets, the purpose of this study is to investigate \nwhether there are any gender stereotypes used by the journalists to create a particular \nrepresentation of Sobchak, and to understand if, through this representation, a particular \nideology is put forward. The framework used to carry out the research is based on \nFairclough’s critical discourse analysis method combined with a sociolinguistic \napproach influenced by Halliday. The application of this framework resulted in studying \nthe three interrelated elements of discourse: sociocultural practices, which explore the \nrole of women in the Russian political arena and put headlines under analysis into an \nimmediate context; discourse practices, which focus on the peculiarities of online news \nproduction, particularly headlines; and linguistic analysis of the headlines themselves, \nin which lexical choice, quotation patterns, and transitivity analyses were performed. \nThe analysis revealed that headlines include hidden gender stereotypes, which align \nwith Russia’s patriarchal ideology and which are used to represent Sobchak less \nfavourably in comparison to her male opponents.