Media Coverage of Russian and US Presidents in English-Language Online Sources in 2024-2025

The article presents the results of a study conducted at the Higher School of Economics in 2025, which aimed to examine the media coverage of three world leaders in the global online information space: Russian President V.V. Putin and the two US Presidents, D.J. Trump and J.R. Biden, during 2024 and early 2025. The study utilized the Factiva information and analytical system to conduct frequency and sentiment analysis on a large dataset of approximately 120 million English-language texts from online resources in over 100 countries, including major global media outlets and analytical websites. The findings show that the three leaders consistently ranked among the most frequently mentioned figures in the English-language global information space throughout 2024 and Q1 2025. Indian Prime Minister N. Modi also exhibited a high mention frequency. All four figures remained in the top five most mentioned persons since 2022-2023, with their rankings shifting annually. From the perspective of agenda-setting theory, this indicates their high significance to the global community. Mentions of the leaders occurred most frequently in neutral-toned texts. The proportion of positive-toned texts was lower than that of negative-toned texts, resulting in a negative sentiment balance for all four cases, which was more pronounced for the two American presidents.