Keywords: News, media, journalism and public opinion

When the U.S. were actively engaged in the presidential race, a poll on the U.S. election was conducted by WIN/Gallup International Association. The poll, carried out among 45 countries, showed that Hillary Clinton was ahead of Donald Trump in every country but one, Russia. For the Russian people, Trump's U.S. presidential election victory became the most memorable event of in November 2016, which attracted the attention of 47% respondents. A month later, 28% of Russians named Trump's victory the most significant event of the year. Nevertheless, not only did the U.S. presidential election draw the attention of the Russian media, but Russia also was a key topic of the U.S. election discussion. For instance, a Fox News Poll of May 2017 found 44% of Americans think Russia attempted to influence the presidential election to help Trump.
This paper provides the first systematic analysis of Russian media coverage of Trump's activities during and after the election campaign. We analyze Trump's position on the Russian press network agenda in three periods: one month before the election (October 9, 2016–November 8, 2016), a month after the election (November 9, 2016–December 9, 2016) and 7 months after the election (June 1, 2017–June 30, 2017). The network agenda for each of the periods was based on the Integrum database, which contains about 500 Russian magazines and over 250 national newspapers. This study focuses on the discussion in the federal print media, since they are the ones that form the agenda. The sample of articles was performed using 23 keywords (network attributes), including pre-election issues, the U.S. internal agenda, international issues, and topics meaningful for Russian interests.
Additionally, the results of public opinion polls on the U.S. election and Trump carried out by the three leading Russian public opinion research companies (WCIOM, FOM, Levada Center) were used. Data from Medialogia, a company aggregating news from 40,000 Russian-language media, including 2,040 print newspapers, were used for the discussion sentiment analysis. The tone of article (positive, negative or neutral) is determined by automated text processing. Medialogia manually checks the algorithm for 1% of news messages to control its correct operation.
We conclude, that Trump's media portrayal was not necessarily positive. During the election, Trump was portrayed by the Russian media not as Russia's favorite candidate, but as Hillary Clinton's opponent and a critic of U.S. recent policies. Only for a short period after Trump's victory in the elections, did the Russian media represent him as a friend of Russia, since there was hope that the new president would lift political and economic sanctions. Trump's policies failed to meet the expectations of the Russian people, and from the beginning of 2017, media coverage of Trump has become critical, hopes for lifting of political sanctions have weakened, and public opinion about the U.S. president has turned negative.