The Strategy of the State National Policy of the Russian Federation: Peculiarities of Coverage in Russian Federal and Regional Mass Medi

The aim of the article is to discuss the way the Strategy of the State National Policy of the Russian Federation (Strategy) and its priority tasks (harmonizing interethnic relations, strengthening the unity of the Russian nation and others) are covered in print, audiovisual and online Russian media today. For this purpose, over 24,000 publications in Russian federal and regional mass media have been examined using the quantitative and qualitative content analysis method. The authors used search by 14 keywords related to the Strategy and its priority tasks (all keywords were extracted from the 2018 version of the document, Part 5) to look for differences in coverage (number of keyword mentions, subject areas of publications, genres, heroes, context, and other factors) in several time periods: from 05 December 2017 to 05 December 2018, from 05 November 2018 to 05 December 2018, and from 07 December 2018 to 07 January 2019 (the latter two periods were compared). The sample included all the publications in federal and regional print, audiovisual (TV and radio), online media and news agency reports that were available in the Integrum electronic media database in May-June 2019. The study revealed an obvious interest in the coverage of the state national policy of the Russian Federation as a broad subject area, which is indicated by the number of references to the state national policy in all segments of the media for both periods of the study, making ‘state national policy' the most popular keyword from the list. At the same time, media distributed their attention to priority areas of the state national policy disproportionally. Among priority tasks, some (e.g., harmonizing interethnic relations) are clearly getting more media attention than others (e.g., safeguarding ethnocultural diversity). Culture, legislation, education and science subject areas significantly prevail over other areas (e.g., economy, religion, migration, and others). The high result in the subject area ‘education and science' points to the important role of education in the implementation of the state national policy of the Russian Federation. The genres of publications are also imbalanced: news significantly prevail over analytical and publicistic genres. There is also a gap between the high number of publications with a positive and neutral tone, on the one hand, and a few publications with a negative tone, on the other hand, which, however, does not seem surprising. Last but not least, the authors revealed that regional media are more active in covering the Strategy and its priority tasks than federal media, and that the Strategy itself is covered much less in the media than its priority tasks.

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