Discursive Construal of Current Events in Russian and English Language Media in the Light of Linguistic Security

The article examines a number of issues pertaining to how reality can be discursively presented in media texts. The modern era is characterized by the rapidly increasing influence of the media on the socio-political changes taking place in the world. The media frequently model events and phenomena around us, and this type of activity is associated with actively transforming reality and constructing a new reality, media reality. All this inevitably raises the question how authentically or accurately the world is represented or reflected in the media. In structuralist studies, the representation in the media is not a key problem and thus is only partially touched upon. In critical linguistics, however, where the concept of biased, distorted, prejudiced representation of reality in discourse is introduced, this problem becomes central. The linguistic approach to the analysis of media reality is based on the idea of discursive construal of the world, which derives from the concept of social design of the world. The purpose of the study presented in this article is to examine the names of subjects or attributes associated with the same facts and events but featured in different Internet media. Using the method of comparative analysis of alternative nominations, the author analyzes media texts from Russian, Belarusian, European, and American sites, and the results of the analysis confirm the fact of alternativeness in the reality representation in the media discourse. The theoretical significance of the results lies in confirming the idea that the choice of nomination is directly related to the creation of the “possible world” and thus contributing to the field of cognitive, discursive, and critical linguistics. The practical value of the results lies in their possible introduction into relevant university courses.