‘Model Putin Forever’. A Critical Discourse Analysis on Vladimir Putin’s Portrayal in Czech Online News Media

This paper examines the Czech online news media representation of Vladimir Putin during three presidential elections (American of 2016, Czech and Russian of 2018). The portrayal of the Russian leader is examined using the methods of the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), mainly by the approach formulated by Teun van Dijk. The results showed a negatively biased portrayal of the president, Russian policy and the country itself, which corresponds with the historical-political context of the Czech-Russian relations, and which is in accordance with the Western media discourse. Applying the methods of global coherence revealed that the overarching theme of the coverage is Putin’s efforts to re-establish Russia as the global power and to restore the binary world as it was during the Cold war, while the methods of local coherence disclosed many implications, categorizations and the ubiquitous sarcasm and negativity in most of the texts.