Establishment of the agenda of the Moscow Times newspaper in the context of Russia's foreign policy (on the example of lighting the Russian military operation in Syria)

The aim of the present study is examination of the relationship between the position of the newspaper «The Moscow Times» and the interpretation of Russian national soft power by studying the agenda setting of the newspaper. «The Moscow Times» is Russia’s only daily English-language newspaper owned by the independent media, and it makes an excellent resource for the review of the Russian political events. The theoretical basis of the study is online agenda setting theory, the so-called third agenda setting theory, which consists in the fact that both the media agenda setting and the public agenda setting exist in an internet-form. This article considers, how newspaper «Moscow Times» establishes the content in order to provide explicit or implicit impact on the audience, directing them what and how to think about certain events.