Impartiality as a Characteristic of Political News Coverage in the Russian Mass Media (by the Example of the Activity of A.Navalny)

Abstract on the diploma paper "Impartiality as a Characteristic of Political News Coverage in the Russian Mass Media (by the Example of the Activity of A. Navalny). The diploma paper contains 118 pages with 12 applications, 20 diagrams and graphs (drawings), 1 table. The reference list consists of: 17 monographs, 15 scientific articles and 13 electronic sources. In the process of research, the media coverage of political events in contemporary Russia was studied with respect to the evaluation characteristics, relating to the case of A. Navalny. The research question: how does the political events’ news coverage in the Russian media relate to the category of impartiality? The goal is to correlate the positions of Russian media within the case with the category of impartiality. For the purpose, the following tasks were fulfilled: to investigate the theoretical basis of sociology and the media; To complete the empirical base and conduct content analysis on the sample (3 TV channels: First, NTV, Rain); to highlight examples of impartiality or distortion of information and draw conclusions. The hypothesis that the control of the power over "pro-state" media excludes news about A. Navalny from the agenda of these sources, lack of criticism is aimed for demonstrating political stability and denying the existence of political competition, was confirmed. The study was conducted within the discourse analysis methodology using the qualitative content analysis method (771 news was analyzed). The conclusions consist of 3 points: "opposition" media have greater impartiality than "pro-state" media; the media impartiality doesn’t imply that it’s objective or true, it includes the availability of the opportunity to express different opinion and the absence of the author's news and his opinion; The exclusion of topics, discourses from the illuminated political field doesn’t exclude them from political reality, resulting in a discrepancy and a growing distrust of such media.