Media images of the Democratic Choice of Russia (DVR), the Union of Right Forces (SPS) and Yabloko in West Siberian liberal party press (1993-2003)

Due to the unfavorable conditions for the transformation of the political and economic system in Russia in the 1990s, the liberal parties needed to determine their own strategy of behavior in order to achieve necessary results in the elections. The election campaign, based on the combination of agitation and propaganda activities and use of information resources, could play a decisive role in the election of a particular political party. Therefore, media images of the liberal parties were constituents of the electoral strategy. The purpose of this article is to determine the main concepts for the formation of the media image of regional liberal parties in Tomsk, Novosibirsk and Kemerovo Oblasts in their periodicals. The object of this research was regional liberal parties the Democratic Choice of Russia (DVR), the Union of Right Forces (SPS) and Yabloko in Tomsk, Novosibirsk and Kemerovo Oblasts. The sources of this research were All-Russian liberal party publications Demokraticheskiy vybor [Democratic Choice], Pravoye delo [Right Cause], Yabloko Rossii [Yabloko of Russia] and their local party newspapers. The author conducted discourse analysis of the materials of liberal parties' publications in the regional press. It made it possible to identify the specificity of the media image in the regional publications in comparison with the All-Russian discourse and to compile a holistic view of the evolution of the media image of the liberal parties from 1993 to 2003. The author found the main concepts of All-Russian liberal media texts, such as "intellectual leadership" in DVR and SPS and "social populism" in the Yabloko. The first two parties emphasized the ideological component and the intelligence level of its members. They propagated liberal principles from the pages of theirs newspapers and explained why it should be DVR and SPS who lead the reforms. Yabloko, as a "party of real actions" and "honest people", focused on the struggle against the existing authorities within the framework of liberal laws and on the implementation of its policy that was most effective in the social sphere. In the West Siberian regional liberal press it was possible to identify the concept "us-them" in the Novosibirsk and Tomsk branches of Yabloko and the Novosibirsk branch of SPS and the concept "bipolarity (we are not they, we are better)" in the Tomsk branch of SPS. The local branches of SPS and Yabloko chose confrontation as their information strategy. The West Siberian branches of Yabloko struggled against the authorities, the Tomsk branch of SPS chose the CPRF as its opponent, and the Novosibirsk branch of SPS, on the pages of its newspapers, announced the "anti-bureaucratic war" against all bureaucrats. Thus, the author comes to a conclusion about the construction of a holistic image of the liberal parties DVR, SPS and Yabloko and their local branches, but a fragmented image of "liberalism".

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