The Сoverage of Death in the Russian and German Media: Intercultural Dimension

“The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses” – said an African American minister and human rights activist Malcolm X. This quote describes the most powerful function of mass media, namely, it can shape the mind of both a particular person and masses. This paper is relevant in the current context of the dominance of mass media all over the world. Nowadays, social media and news agendas have almost unlimited power, they can ban accounts of Presidents, disclose state secrets or manipulate the masses. The aim of the study is to define the extend to which mass media in German and Russia influence on the image of death as a taboo topic and how it helps to rule the fear of death in societies in both countries. To study these questions were chosen the following methods of research: content analysis, comparison and sampling. The anticipated results of the study are to define methods by which mass media shape the opinion and how they influence on the perception of death.