Медийные социальные представления о пандемии во французских СМИ

Вестник Московского университета. Серия 10: Журналистика. 2024. № 2(49). С. 48–67.

Radina N., Bannikov K.

The article is devoted to media social representations, a theoretical construct of media research from the socio-psychological field. Media social representations are forms of groupthink, formed by media discourse, revealing patterns and clichés for representing reality. The article aims to present an algorithm for reconstructing media social representations based on computational linguistics. It was suggested that semantically similar terms used by journalists when creating texts create different media social representations, i.e. the choice of a signifying term entails a certain discursive frame in the representation of reality. To test the hypothesis, the media social representations “pandémie”, “coronavirus”, “COVID-19” were reconstructed using the material of the French publications Le Monde, Le Figaro and Le Parisien (2020–2022; 58 432 texts). It turned out that in French media discourse the media social representation of “pandemic” is focused on objective threats, the media social representation of “coronavirus” reconstructs the psychological struggle with danger, and the media social representation of “COVID-19” reproduces the atmosphere of despair and panic. Thus, semantically close signifiers (“coronavirus”, “COVID-19” and “pandemic”) created different media social representations, allowing, through the linguistic and psychological resources of naming, to create different worlds of the pandemic

Keywords: медиадискурс, коммуникативистика, media discourse, Le Monde, Le Figaro, Le Parisien, Le Monde, Le Figaro, Le Parisien, media social representations, communicative studies, медийные социальные представления