Media Sociology and Psychology.

What does term

Psakiing mean. Its appearance and usage among
Facebook users Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)
Anna Andreasen
Medialogy MED6, Aalborg University Copenhagen


Abstract This article describes a new phenomenon that
mirrors Russian society as result of Russian-Ukrainian
crisis - Psakiing. The term is associated with
incompetence of the public figure and rapidly developed a
populist ideological approach of Russian mass media
towards the American policy in general, framing Jen Psaki
- a spokesperson for US State Department, as ignorant and
incompetent public figure. Analysis of caricatures was
done through Critical Discourse Analysis. In order to
study the importance of text written on caricatures t-test
was conducted. The findings proved the influence of
semantics on semiotics.

Keywords Critical Discourse analysis, Jen Psaki, mass
media, caricatures, social networks, propaganda.

I. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION
Authors motivation for choosing this topic of
interest is a resent crisis development between
Russia and Ukraine.
The research that is conducted answer the following
problem statement:
Do political caricatures need a text in order to
communicate the message?

A. Contextual History
The crisis started at the end of 2013 in Ukraine in
a form of protests against oligarchs and a struggle
for democracy and free choice with further
escalation resulting in international conflict
between two historically close nations Russians
and Ukrainians. This situation has been discussed
not only among politicians and journalists but also
among ordinary people. Social networks could
neither avoid a sudden interest to this crisis, as it
touches primary the feelings and connections of
millions of people being in different social relations
on the networks. A lot of articles were discussed,
programs made on television, opinions given and
pictures posted on social media in relation to this
crisis. Its well-known fact that modern media
through news, debates, and discussion programs,
documentary facts, internet, influences and shapes
public opinion and a general knowledge of the
world(1).
Politicians influence their audience through
speech. Language in general manifests social
processes and interactions. When one of the
politicians is not able to present the audience with
the truthful informational facts and in general lacks
knowledge about the names, events, places, history
or geography he or she is working with, this might
lead to a negative acknowledgement of the
politician, or in a worst case scenario - to a laughing
stock with a nominal name attached. This is exactly
what happened to Jen Psaki - a spokesperson for the
United States Department of State. Her answers
about the situation in Ukraine do most often raise a
smile among Russian audience, since she lacks the
knowledge of the situation. Therefore recently more
often one could see caricatures devoted to her on
Facebook, emphasizing and exaggerating her
complete ignorance of the situation. Jen Psaki got
herself a very large audience, who is not only
joking about her statements but also making songs
devoted to her
1
.
This fact gave the author a ground to analyze this
phenomenon through a critical discourse analysis.
CDA describes study and analysis of written and
spoken texts. It points out the discursive source of
power, dominance, inequality and bias. On top of
that it investigates the way these discursive sources

1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYxyYUnk3zA (with English
subtitles)
are enable to continue to reproduce within specific
social, political and historical contexts (2).
Analysis of Psaki phenomenon (during a couple
of months) might help to understand the dependent
factors for recognition politicians on caricatures and
rapid negative popularity.
The following was provided by Google search
engine (images):

Figure 1 Psaki: http://pikabu.ru/story/psaknut_yeto_2298808
Psakiing is derived from the name of the
representative of the U.S. State Department Jen
Psaki. The term means stupidity said sagely, and
denial of its further acceptance. Russian mass
media started to use this term as a populist
propaganda approach to the critical political
situation between Russian and USA.

II. RELATED WORK
The author has looked into several works within
CDA, describing cartoons:
One of well known is Prophet Muhammad
cartoons controversy. First cartoons were
published by Jullands-Posten in 2005, which ended
up in an international crisis. Discursive struggle in
the Mohammed cartoon affair by Christian Stokke
explores the discursive struggle when hegemonic
ideology is challenged by counter-narrative(3).
Another representation is Akosua cartoons in the
Daily Guide: a discourse analysis by Kweku
Rockson. It describes editorial cartoons. He uses the
interpretive and qualitative approach for visual
opinion discourse. He also comes with another
example of Katz (2004), who provided a historical
example of political cartoons in USA, tracing the
beginning of this phenomenon to 1754. Another
example he describes is Phillips and Hardy (2002)
used CDA of cartoons as a part of the research of
refugees system in Canada(4).
Linus Abraham (2009) in Effectiveness of
cartoons as uniquely visual medium for orienting
social issues looks at the cartoons as visual
semiotics and persuasion, showing the effectiveness
of the cartoons in political communication and
public opinion formation. Cartoons represent
platforms for the constructing and framing social
reality. Cartoonists manipulate with public
opinion(4).

III. METHODS
Research environment for this matter was
Facebook. The users were picked up as a
convenience random sampling primary through
groups where the author is a member. Between-
group design was used. Participants were Facebook
users of different nationalities, men and women
included. Age range was from 21 to 55.
Several methods were used in this research: CDA,
qualitative and quantitative methods. CDA
investigated origin and semantics of the caricatures
used in questionnaire. Furthermore it helped to
establish their ideological context. One of the
qualitative methods used was field observation,
where the author was a participant as observer. The
purpose for this was to be as close to the social
network groups as possible. However it made also a
negative impact on the author bias problem due to
full engagement into the activity. On top of that the
author had to look through all news and analytical
programs from several countries: Russia, USA,
Great Britain and Denmark. This was another bias,
as the she formed her own opinion on these events.
However it did not influence the research, as major
political problem will not be a topic of discussion.
Participants had to fill in online semi-opened
questionnaire, describing caricatures, images and
events they portrayed. They also had to state their
educational background, nationality, country of
living and birth, if they were members of social
networks, politically active and state the
newspapers they know and read. Caricatures used
in the research were the following:


Figure 2 Psaki and carousel
Figure Figure 2 Psaki and carousel, Psaki did not know the
meaning of the term carousel election (method of
vote rigging in elections) and also mentioned
childrens voting, but however did not think that
children were going around on carousel and voting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYaqlCPr_No


Figure 3 Psaki moving the US fleet
Figure Figure 3 Psaki moving the US fleet Psaki, wanted to
move the 6th fleet of the USA to the borders of
Belorussia, without any sea access (fiction made by
bloggers).


Figure 4 Psaki is warning about the US fleet
On figure Figure 4 Psaki is warning about the US fleet, Psaki is
warning about Russia that she can move the 6th
fleet of the USA to the borders of Belorussia, which
does not have any sea boarders (fiction made by
bloggers).


Figure 5 Psaki and Klitchko
On figure Figure 5 Psaki and Klitchko, Psaki and Klichko
(new mayor of Kiev, Ukraine) are together (fiction
made by bloggers). The main idea is that they both
are worth each other and have problems with
rhetoric and understanding of what they are saying.


Figure 6 Psaki statement about the Russian embassy
On figure Figure 6 Psaki statement about the Russian embassy is
Psakis a fiction statement about the Russian
embassy attacked by peaceful demonstrators. The
real statement of Jen Psaki inspired this caricature.
She was defending the former Ukrainian minister of
foreign affairs, who in front of the Russian embassy
in Kiev used an f-word toward Russian president
Vladimir Putin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_e
mbedded&v=wY2ghdAUpf4


Figure 7 No Psakiing
Figure 7 No Psakiing means: do not "psaki" or "psakiing"
(ignorance) is prohibited
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2014/06/05/jen-psaki-
the-russian-internets-public-enemy-no-1/
According to Fairclough discourse (language use)
shapes and is shaped by the society. It addresses
social problems and does ideological work(5). All
the images presented above are a representation of
discourse. In this case there is a public person, who
has taken a life on the Russian part of the social
network. Language on CDA is not a neutral
phenomenon. It is more a precondition for
developing new practices and convention and at the
end it might even transform society (5). The
Western media ignored Psakis incompetence of
Ukrainian-Russian crisis. In this research the author
used social-cognitive model of T. van Djik, which
is ideological analysis, as typically ideology is
expressed and reproduced in discourse and
communication. CDA is primary text based and
incorporates interpretive (text based) and social
tradition (context based) into one framework.
Discourse involves meaning, interpretation and
understanding. When used by powerful actors it
gives an opportunity to control other peoples
actions(6). This in turn means that the social groups
that control the most powerful discourse also are
more likely to control the minds and actions of
others. RT (Russian Television) is very often
present at the press conferences of the State
Department. As it has a very big audience it has an
opportunity to influence the discourse. Furthermore
it uses Psaki as propaganda and a stigmatizing
catch-all term for everything Russians dislike
about the US policy. Albeit this term includes
dislike to the entire pro-American policy Russian
networkers grieved, when there came a rumors
about Jen Psaki being fired and replaced by Maria
Harf. Twitter was filled up with condolences from
the Russian part of the network about the loss of
such an entertaining public figure.
The images and caricatures that were fictional
had a great impact on the Facebook users, as the
majority could not define if they were fictional or
real. Persuasion of the public opinion formation
was at its highest. Those caricatures were able to
construct the whole new social reality, which still
helps to manipulate public opinion. They were the
main core of ideological position of the mirrored
reality used by mass media. This was possible due
to the language primary meaning and further
contextual, which Psaki used through almost every
briefing that showed her incompetence as a public
speaker when presenting the policy of the US State
Department.

IV. FINDINGS
Statistical analysis was made in order to prove
the existence of the significant difference between
means of two groups, the controlled group (primary
Danish origin), who had to understand the meaning
of the caricature and images without a text
description, and test group (primary Russian origin),
who got the same images only with the text
description on them as shown on Table 2 Variables for t-test.
Furthermore the author categorized the remarks
and answers from the test participants presented in
the following classification table below:
0

No understanding of the events/images

1 Understanding the image or its
resemblance to another image
2

Understanding the situation from the
images
3 Understanding the meaning from the
images

4 Understanding meaning and context of the
images
5 Full description of the images, perfect
knowledge of the situation, character
recognition
Table 1 Categorization of the caricatures semantics
Null hypothesis was the following:
There is no significant difference of means between
the group with text and the group without text
context on the caricatures.
Before doing the t-test the author made sure that
the data had a normal distribution, as shown on the
Figure 8 Data Distribution.

Figure 8 Data Distribution
The following variables were defined:
Independent

Dependent
Understanding of
caricature/image

With text
Without text
Table 2 Variables for t-test
Two-tailed t-test gave the following results:
1. Control Group:
Sum 55
N 84
Var s^2 1.143859451
StdDev 1.069513652
Mean 0.654761905

2. Test Group:
Sum 295
N 84
Var s^2 3.867326449
StdDev 1.966551919
Mean 3.511904762

Since the variances were unequal the results were
the following: DF was 129 (very high), T-value was
-11.7, 95% confidence interval for the difference (-
3.3402, -2.274). Since p-value was 2.34299E-23
(less than 0.05), the probability of the observed
results due to random chance was very low. On this
ground zero hypothesis was rejected.



V. CONCLUSIONS
CDA proved that through caricatures and
extensive mass media propaganda it is possible to
shape societys opinion. Furthermore with
development of social networks it became easier to
influence the society.
There are a lot of closed and opened groups on
Facebook that the author became a member of and
made a field research. It had been noticed that
people that were the members of political groups
had a better knowledge of the events than ordinary
Facebook users. However Russian population in
general knew what psakiing mean, as recently Jen
Psaki became very popular on Russian Television,
radio and newspapers. Through the questionnaire
author made a conclusion that members of
Facebook political groups did not experience that
much influence of the Russian mass media as the
Facebook users living in Russia. That might have
been due to certain language barriers. This should
be further researched.
Albeit everything mentioned there are other
correlations that should be studied in more details,
such as compliance between different national mass
medias: the percent of coverage international news
and their impact on the audience or a lack of the last.
This came out of another conclusion, made after the
questionnaire majority of the Danish users, even
reading American newspapers and being interested
in politics, did not know the context of the situation
and absolutely could not recognize US State
Department spokesperson. However the users test
sample was not large enough to claim these
statements for certain.
There had been no correlation found between age,
political interests, level of education and knowledge
of US public figures and their speech through the
questionnaire. Finally it had been noticed that there
were neither information about Jen Psaki nor her
statements on the Danish television or newspapers.
This work did only scratch a surface of that social
development. A more detailed research should be
done in order to understand the nature of such a
rapid development of psaki phenomenon and
premises of its growth.
Quantitative analysis proved that written text is a
very helpful tool in understanding semantic context
and semiotic meaning of the caricatures, as it
communicates clearer message. However for
political caricatures audience should have an
understanding of the situation in the society. The
fact that mean for the Danish users was very low
can be interpreted as a lack of interest to the crisiss
details, which Danish mass media did neither cover
fully. In this concern the audience interest to this
problem is also very low, as its not covered by hot
debate in the society. Mean of the test group
however was very high due to the reasons described
already above. Furthermore it might be challenging
to continue testing this group without caricatures
text support. Albeit a couple of caricatures did not
contain any texts and this fact did not low the
results, as users could straight away recognize the
public figure and got the context of the situation.
As a conclusion the author would like to point out
the fact that political caricatures do not need a
written text in case the whole society is engaged
into the social problem by mass media, social
networks, etc. Psaki nonetheless became a
collective image of everything that is unacceptable
and intolerant and hated by the Russian society,
which can be offered by the United States at the
moment. At last, despite that negative collective
effect she caused, Jen Psaki, at the same time is
appreciated by the Russian audience and might be
missed as history already showed.



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