Modelling the Image of the Country and the Image of a Political Leader in the American Media Discourse

The purpose of this article is to consider the linguistic features of the representation of a number of states and their heads in the American media discourse and to identify the influence of the language of the media and the political orientation of the publication on the construction of the image of the state and its leader. The analysis of publications in the journal “Foreign Affairs” devoted to such countries as Brazil, the Philippines, Hungary and their heads of state is carried out. American journalists attribute the political regime of these countries to autocracies, and the leaders to populists. In this regard, the relevance of the study is due not only to the wide interest in the problem of constructing the image of the state and the image of a political leader from a wide range of specialists, including political scientists, sociologists, linguists, psychologists, etc., but also to the influence of media texts on the formation and transformation of the image in the mind of the addressee. The subject of the study is the lexical and stylistic means of representing the images of the above-mentioned countries and their heads of state in the media text. The object of the study is the analytical articles of the journal “Foreign Affairs”, which reflect the socio-political realities. In this study, the methods of stylistic analysis, semantic analysis, contextual analysis of political media texts, as well as a descriptive method, including the generalization and interpretation of the information received, were used. The conclusion is made about the formation of the image of the country and its leader based on the reception of contrast, the wide inclusion of pejorative semantics, intertextuality techniques, lexical means of various stylistic tonality in the text, and the implementation by the authors of media texts of various strategies in imposing a certain image of the country and its leader on the addressee.