CONSTRUCTING «COVID-19 PANDEMIC» in FREELY EDITABLE and TRADITIONAL MEDIA: a COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

The Master’s thesis is devoted to the study of the representation of the event "COVID-19 pandemic" in the materials of the Russian-language segment of the Wikipedia resource and traditional Russian media (pro-government and liberal). In the theoretical part of the research, the author studies the phenomenon of freely editable information sources using the example of the Wikipedia. At the same time, considerable attention is paid to the role of the media in the process of constructing and shaping public opinion in relation to various socio-political problems. The theoretical part of the research is based on the sociological theory of knowledge constructed by P. Berger and T. Luckmann and the concept of social problems by P. Ibarra and J. Kitsuse. Content analysis was performed by AntConc software. In the practical part of the study, various ways of shaping public opinion were studied using the example of the "vaccine race" and other significant events caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.