International media image of Russia: Trends and patterns of perception

Abstract

The article presents the results of the research of media image of Russia as a great power in the international political media discourse. The main method used was the content analysis of a corpus of American, British, German, French and Spanish printed media texts during the period from 2000 to the present time. Despite the fact that Russia appears today in a fundamentally new quality and the international political establishment still sees it as one of the leading world powers, its image in the foreign media is mostly negative and largely based on stereotypes of the last century. Special attention the media pays to Russian foreign policy, describing it as aggressive and based on «imperial ambitions». The consequence of all this is a rejection of Russia as an integral part of the «civilized world», as a state which is ready to share «universal values» as they are seen by the Western society.