Image of Russia in the Coronavirus Era: Verbal American, British, and Spanish Media Broadcast

This work analyzes verbal features of the media broadcast of the image of Russia in American, British, and Spanish newspaper articles and reveals the most frequent thematic dominants when creating the image of Russia in pandemic conditions in American, English, and Spanish media messages. For 5 months, the topic “COVID-19” is one of the most discussed in the media. Russia faced this problem later than countries such as Great Britain, Spain, and the United States, but on May 24, 2020 Russia moved to the third place in the world in terms of the number of infected. This led to many news reports on the Coronavirus and its consequences for the Russian population. The topicality of the research is determined by continuous increase of popularity of media in modern information space, the importance of the American, British, and Spanish media messages in the course of rendering influence on mass consciousness in the pandemic conditions and the need to identify the most frequent thematic dominants in the process of studying the verbal features of the image of Russia in the situation with Covid-19. The study was based on articles we’ve taken from the modern American, British, and Spanish mass media. The main methods of the study are discourse analysis, lexico-semantic analysis, stylistic analysis, interpretive analysis, reception of a continuous sample from American, British, and Spanish mass media from 03.2020 to 07.2020. Main thematic dominants in American, British, and Spanish media messages during the coronavirus era were identified: the self-isolation regime in Russia, the lifting of restrictions in Moscow in order to hold the Victory parade and vote on amendments to the Constitution, the role of Vladimir Putin in the fight against coronavirus. We have established that the American, British, and Spanish mass media cover all the identified topics, most of which implement mainly negative connotations, creating a negative image of Russia for the readership of the linguistic cultures under consideration.