Crucial components of strategic communication include the audience, which plays a decisive role in how any conflict plays out. Strategic narratives are seen as means by which political actors attempt to construct a shared meaning of international politics to shape the behaviour of domestic and international actors. The article analyzes the news discourse of the Russian media sources RT, Pervyj Kanal, and NTV on Russia’s coronavirus aid to Italy in spring 2020. In the context of media coverage, some methodological questions arise: How should the intentional structuring of narratives, targeting of audiences, and the manipulative intentions of the strategic actor be studied? For this purpose, the article combines strategic narrative theory with Umberto Eco’s concepts of the Model Reader and the Model Author. Analysing the aims and intentionality of the strategic narratives, we postulate the Model Reader as an analytical category that organizes the study of the audience’s interpretation process. The function of the Model Reader is to actualize the codes and intertextual references that the author has strategically planned in the news message, in order to achieve the geopolitical aims of the strategic narratives in question. The analysis of constructing the Model Reader and the Model Author of strategic narratives is complemented by Greimas’ semiotic theory of the narrative and the composition principles of Lotman’s discrete/non-discrete texts.

中文翻译：

---

战略叙事的符号学方法：俄罗斯抗疫援助意大利的新闻话语

战略沟通的关键组成部分包括受众，他们对冲突的结果起着决定性作用。战略叙事被视为政治行为者试图构建国际政治的共同意义以塑造国内和国际行为者行为的手段。文章分析俄罗斯媒体消息来源的新闻话语RT,佩尔维吉运河， 和国家电视台关于俄罗斯 2020 年春季对意大利的冠状病毒援助。在媒体报道的背景下，出现了一些方法论问题：应该如何研究叙事的有意结构、受众目标以及战略行为者的操纵意图？为此，本文将战略叙事理论与翁贝托·艾柯的模型读者和模型作者概念相结合。通过分析战略叙事的目标和意向性，我们将模型读者假设为一个分析类别，组织对受众解读过程的研究。模型阅读器的功能是实现作者在新闻信息中战略性规划的代码和互文参考，以实现相关战略叙述的地缘政治目标。格雷马斯的叙事符号学理论和洛特曼离散/非离散文本的构成原则对战略叙事的模型读者和模型作者的构建分析进行了补充。