Reflection of modern relations between the West and Russia by the mediaframe "teacher-student"

Scale and intensity of an information confrontation between western countries (the USA and the EU countries) and Russia is so high that it reminds the information conflict of the Cold War. Nowadays, Russia finds itself in a difficult political and economic situation and has to respond to serious internal and international economic and political shocks. Along with these one can see the ever-increasing mediatization of political relations, in this condition Russia has to defend its right to an independent international policy in the unfriendly western media landscape. Nowadays, one of the most effective media strategies is mediaframing. The reason of its effectiveness is based on a fact that it creates cognitive perception frames within which an individual interprets a media message. Metaphors, links, hints, and others means allow connecting new information with existing social experience, which helps the individual understand the main idea of mediatexts. Thus, a journalist or a person who creates a media text can enclose a significant amount of information into a short text and make it emotional. That is why such texts are able to avoid critical perception. Going back to the frame "Teacher-Student", the author underlines that it has a long history. In different periods, Russia was considered as a diligent student, or an arrogant student who does everything wrong. Since the late 1990s Russia was becoming a poor, stubborn, grumpy and lazy student who did not pay attention to the study of democracy and was about to receive F for its homework. These changes can be explained by Russia's desire to build an independent foreign and internal policy. What is more interesting, this frame is used in articles devoted to other topics, such as relations Russia-Ukraine-USA and Russia-Ukraine-EU, and some other topics related to political issues of Eastern European countries. In these articles, Russia is used as an example of a wrong way of development, as a country which does not want to take experience of western countries, and sometimes Russia serves as a boogeyman for the civilized countries. In these circumstances, one cannot say about equality in international relations since Russia is considered as a student who cannot have an equal dialog with a teacher. Thus, mediaframing is an effective instrument of events and images mediation in the conditions of the ever-increasing virtualization of social relations. Nowadays, this strategy is used by a number of western countries in order to legitimize their policy towards Russia. Positioning of relations between the West and Russia as relations of a teacher and a student undoubtedly reduces the effectiveness of the Russian international policy, lowering its status in the eyes of the general public.

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