THE ABUSE OF MEDIA POWER: A CASE STUDY OF OPEN LETTERS

Abstract

This paper represents an attempt to draw attention to the fact that public statements can be used for the abuse of media power and spread of politically incorrect speech. The aim of this paper is to show all the strategies that the actor uses to deal with his political opponents using the form of open letters. The corpus of this research comprises all nine open letters that the owner of Pink media company Željko Mitrović sent to Aleksandar Rodić, the owner of Kurir daily newspapers (four letters), Radoslav Milojičić, Democratic party MP (three letters) and  Saša Mirković, a local politician and music manager (two letters) during June and July 2017. All these letters – public statements are full of hate speech and were broadcast in their entirety  in Pink TV news programs, as well as in some daily newspapers with large circulation. Qualitative method of content analysis of these public letters determined  the elements which the sender of the message used to disqualify the recipients: greetings and farewells formulas, word choice, figures of speech, as well as strategies of antagonism, blackmailing, moralizing and advocate of the government.