Multimodal means of representation of values in digital military-political discourse: verbal, visual, and interface components (based on the case study of the "Iran-Israel conflict of 2026" in English-language media)

The article is dedicated to the study of multimodal means of representing values in digital military-political media discourse. The theoretical framework relies on the multimodal discourse analysis concept by G. Kress and T. van Leeuwen, R. Entman's framing theory, as well as the principles of linguoaxiological analysis of media texts. The empirical basis includes materials from English-language digital media platforms (The Washington Post, The New York Times, Reuters) and publications by D. Trump on the Truth Social platform (February–April 2026, case study of the Iran-Israel conflict). The work describes the mechanisms of interaction between verbal, visual, and interface components as a unified axiological system of digital media texts. It has been established that the multimodal organization of digital discourse provides a synergistic effect of axiological influence that is unattainable when each of the modalities is realized separately. The methodology includes: (1) multimodal discourse analysis; (2) linguoaxiological analysis of evaluative vocabulary and metaphorical structures; (3) framing analysis; (4) semiotic analysis of the visual array; (5) analysis of the interface architecture of platforms. For each publication in the corpus, the following elements were recorded: title and subtitle, captions for illustrations, rubric and tags, structure of the visual array, and navigational context of the material. This study of multimodal means of representing values in digital military-political discourse allows for the formulation of the following conclusions. First, the methodological productivity of the integrative three-level approach, including the analysis of verbal, visual, and interface components, has been confirmed: each modality carries an independent axiological load and participates in the systemic construction of value settings. Second, it has been revealed that different types of platforms (quality press vs. social network politics) implement fundamentally incompatible multimodal axiological systems: institutional (WashPost/NYT) and affective-direct (Truth Social). This indicates that the question of "who speaks" in the digital space is inseparable from the question of "in what interface context this is said." Third, the studied corpus recorded a new phenomenon – AI-generated visual content as an axiological tool, which poses a challenge for linguistics to develop special analytical approaches to the semiotics of synthetic media images. Future research prospects include a diachronic analysis of the transformation of multimodal axiological systems during the conflict, as well as an inter-platform comparative analysis based on Asian and Russian-speaking media resources.