THE STEREOTYPIZATION OF RUSSIA’S IMAGE IN BRITISH MEDIA (BASED ON THE INDEPENDENT)

Abstract

The article reveals problems of constructing stereotypical ideas about Russia by western media within the current international and political agenda. Since February 2022, there has been an aggravation of complicated relations between the Russian Federation and the “collective” West in connection with the start of a special military operation. In this regard, it is necessary to define how the current events are interpreted by foreign media and whether they actualize new stereotypical representations about Russia among the mass audience. In this paper, the image of Russia is studied on the material of the articles published by “The Independent” – British Internet-media. In the course of the study by methods of contextual, semantic and stylistic analyses we investigated the content of news articles about Russia in the context of events in Ukraine. By means of an interpretive analysis of evaluative statements and lexical means representing the image of our country we identified a new stereotype denoted “Russian aggression”. The conclusions indicate that evaluative means, being the key semantic components of a media text, reinforce new negative stereotypes about Russia among the audience. The practical significance of the work is in the possibility of using the materials and conclusions of the study in special courses about media linguistics, the theory of speech impact, stylistics, political linguistics as illustrating examples of influence on the opinion of mass recipients.