American conservative media discourse and Russia’s changing identity: corpus-based analysis of the Fox News discourse on Russia in 2011-2016

Since the Cold War relationships between Russia and the US were constantly evolving, ranging from extremely hostile during the Cold War to bearable frenemy relationships after the Great Powers Competition ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. However, in the second decade of the 21 century, Russia slowly started to assert itself as an emerging power, questioning the US dominance in the international arena. This identity shift led to a certain tension in the relationships between the two countries. The evolution of the bi-lateral relationships was accompanied by the evolution of the narratives created by both sides; the aim of this dissertation is by exploring the articles on Russia produced by Fox News in 2011-2016 and using the methods of Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis to investigate Russian discourse of the biggest Republican-leaning media outlet. The first chapter of this dissertation represents a theoretical framework that creates a basis for further analysis. It covers the historical perspective of the American discourse on Russia, gives a brief overview of the media theory as well as provides an outlook on other theoretical frameworks employed during the research process. This study uses the tools of Corpus Linguistics as well as qualitative Critical Discourse analysis methods in order to provide a broad vision of the conservative American media discourse on Russia. The second chapter contains the methodological part which explains the research choices that were made during the analysis. It outlines the process of building the corpus (the articles for the corpus were retrieved from Fox News’ website archive) and explains the following steps of the research. The third Data & Analysis and Discussion chapter provides a presentation and interpretation of the collected data. In order to better articulate the topic, I divided the chapter into two analytical categories such as Fox News narrative on Russia before and after the Ukrainian crisis: between the evil and the victim and Fox News Russian discourse in the framework of the Conservative VS Liberal ideological confrontation in the US. These sections contain an overview of the collected data complemented with interpretation. The final discussion section aims to summarize the results of the analysis in accordance with the research questions. The fourth chapter is devoted to the Russian mainstream media perspective. In order to give a brief overview of the Russian perspective, I selected 6 articles; the articles were retrieved from the websites of Russian pro-governmental media outlets. In this section, I used the tools of qualitative analysis in order to analyse the materials. The articles under investigation were translated from Russian into English without any external assistance.