Figurative comparisons as expressemes in the media texts of the TV program Vesti nedeli with Dmitry Kiselyov

The research was carried out in line with media linguistics, a branch of the language science, the subject of which is the media text as a discrete discursive unit functioning in printed, auditory, visual, and online media. Media linguistics, which appeared at the turn of the XXI century, interacts with political and cognitive linguistics, sociology, stylistics, rhetoric, and discursology. One of the current promising areas of communicative linguistics is media linguistics, which deals with the issues of the relationship between verbal and media components. In the context of these studies, the linguistic organization of media speech in information and analytical programs is of special interest, since these programs interpret the facts of objective reality differently, due to the political and ideological emphases of news sources and the subjective perception of communicative events by the addresser (political observer, analyst or journalist). To describe the events that are in the focus of social attention, the author of the media text uses a wide range of pictorial linguistic means, among which figurative comparisons stand out. The author’s comparative expressemes in media texts are distinguished by non-standardness and novelty, they create the effect of surprise, which helps to influence the consciousness of the mass audience. The purpose of the work is to investigate individual author’s comparative constructions as expressemes used in socio-political media discourse, and to trace their stylistic functions using the materials of informational and analytical media texts of the TV program Vesti Nedeli with Dmitry Kiselyov (Weekly News with Dmitry Kiselyov).