Reality of Russian Industrial Region in American Media: Aspects of Framing

Abstract

The features of media framing of ideas about the strategically important industrial region for Russia in the American media is discussed in the article. A noticeable increase in foreign journalistic publications covering the problems of the Chelyabinsk region in the period from 2010 to 2021 determines the relevance of studying the generation of meanings about the South Urals as a subject of an open global society. In theoretical and methodological terms, the study is based on the achievements of foreign and domestic discourse studies, cognitive linguistics and the theory of cognitive-discursive world modeling. The material for the analysis was 271 texts selected by continuous sampling from 82 American editions of the last eleven years. The sociological interpretation of frame structures as interpretative schemes is taken as a basis. The concept of representational structure is refined and used to designate the discursive world as a conceptually complex unit of analysis, correlated with the processes and results of representing an industrial region in American media. The frame structures constituting the discursive world are revealed. It has been established that they determine the perception of the region through the prism of a limited set of characteristics included in the macroframes CULTURAL IDENTITY and SECURITY AND PROTECTION. The study contributes to media linguistics, discourse studies, and philological urban studies.