The Parliamentary election in Russia held in December, 2011 caused vote fraud scandal and resulted in a wide-scale protest movement which spread all over the country. The Western media repeatedly compared political situation in Russia to ‘Arab spring’. Russian media, in their turn, got divided in two opposite camps regarding their reporting on the issue. This study examines news coverage of the political conflict in two Russian media outlets and interprets the findings within the framework of propaganda. The analysis incorporates two main levels: institutional and textual. In-depth interviews with the journalists were conducted in order to establish what internal and external factors, such as censorship or state control, shaped news reporting and promoted ideological bias. The comparative analysis of news coverage involved two media outlets Russia Today and Radio Liberty, which adhere to different ideological perspectives. The results show that both media represented contrasting versions of the situation and used information selectively in order to pursue certain goals. Nevertheless, the analysis allows to conclude that Russia Today explicitly supported the views of the Russian authorities and oppressed undesirable facts and opinions. Its news policy also evokes an idea of cold war, as it repeatedly appeals to the image of external enemy – the USA. Radio Liberty, in contrast, provided various opportunities to the discontent part of the Russian society to speak out, which can be considered as an attempt to represent the other side of the story, as it was excluded from the news agenda of the state owned media. However, news policy of Radio Liberty also implied certain propagandistic objectives. The study confirms the assumption that propaganda arguably exists within any political doctrine, but can take explicit and implicit forms which are difficult to detect without thorough scrutiny of overall news reportage of certain media. Further research should look at the role of social media in a series of political scandals and protest movement awakening in Russia, as many media experts link the political situation with emergence of new means of communication. It could also compare news representation of the current political conflict in several Russian domestic independent media to detect distinctions and similarities and try to evaluate what kind of an ideology they communicated to the audience.

No description available.

The current paper examines the dissimilarities that have occurred in news framing by state-sponsored news outlets in their different language versions. The comparative framing analysis is conducted on the news coverage of the Russian intervention in Syria (2016) in RT and Radio Liberty in Russian and English languages. The certain discrepancies in framing of this event are found in both news outlets. The strongest distinction between Russian and English versions occurred in framing of responsibility and humanitarian crisis in Syria. The study attempts to explain the identified differences in a framework of public diplomacy and propaganda studies. The existing theories explain that political ideology and foreign policy orientation influences principles of state propaganda and state-sponsored international broadcasting. However, the current findings suggest that other influence factors may exist in the field – such as the local news discourse and the journalistic principles. This conclusion is preliminary, as there are not many studies with the comparable research design, which could support the current discussion. The studies of localized strategies of the international media (whether private networks or state-funded channels) can refine the current conclusions and bring a new perspective to global media studies. / <p>This thesis was supported by the Swedish Institute (Svenska Institutet) </p>

Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio University, November, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Examining how different media news outlets frame the same situation is an important step towards understanding how the world’s media systems behave. This study examines how four influential news media outlets, belonging to different media systems, have framed Sweden's management of the Covid-19 pandemic during two time-periods when the Covid-19 virus surged. These two media systems are state owned news outlets, consisting of RT (previously Russia Today) and Xinhua, and commercial news outlets, through BBC News and the New York Times.ThestudyusesadeductiveFramingTheorymethod,asdefinedbySemetkoand Valkenburg (2000), to understand how the framing of this case differs between the two media systems. Beyond Framing Theory, the theoretical framework is extended by including the Propaganda Model (Durham and Kellner 2012; Fuchs 2018) and Nation Branding (Potter 2009), to further understand the contextual forces that influence the news outlets. The results of the study determines that there are differences in the use of framing between the two media systems as well as where they stem from. This implies that the context in which the outlet finds itself impacts the framing of the produced articles. Overall, Attribution of Responsibility proved to be the most common frame, followed by Conflict framing. The first one wasmostcommoninthestateownedoutlets,whereasConflictwasmostcommonforthe commercial news outlets.

In January 2020, the world heard about a new virus, Covid-19, that soon reached around theentire globe. Covid-19 became a global challenge that would lead to widespread restrictionsin the name of prevention – and debates about weather states were doing the right thing. Thispaper looks at the outbreak in Germany and Russia and compares what measures have beentaken to contain the pandemic, and how one Russian state media outlet has interpreted theseactions. A qualitative analysis will be conducted to determine how the state-affiliated newsprovider Russia Today Deutsch framed the situation in Germany and Russia and which voicesthey treated as salient as the pandemic progressed to a German speaking audience. It will beshown that Russia Today Deutsch has different approaches between the two countries: while itcriticises the German government, it praises the Russian state to institute near identicalmeasures.

As immigration turns into the scapegoat of political and social tensions all over the world and politicians that seem to be talking about migration flows communicate instead their conception of the world and where it should head, this study investigates the refugee crisis of 2015 as represented in the two global television channels RT and BBCW. Widely studied for the depiction the press gives of the refugees, for the first time the refugee crisis is analyzed as an arena where competing understandings of international relations are constructed, in a media ecology where a myriad of actors have a chance to foreground their truth and where wars are fought, and possibly won, through the weapons of values, culture and the attraction they exercise (Nye Jr. 1990, 2013). Borrowing the concept of strategic narratives from international relations (Miskimmon et al. 2013) and applying it to textual analysis, the study employs framing analysis to operationalize it and explores a sample of 144 news items (74 from RT and 70 from BBCW) broadcast in August and September 2015 to retrace the narratives of the two channels. It finds out that, although conflicting with each other, both RT’s and BBCW’s narratives are strategic and aim at constructing a past, present and future of international relations that can influence what we expect, consider acceptable or conceivable on the international theater. The channels’ narratives are about the destiny of Europe and countries, depicting a reality that still responds to old Cold War dividing lines. An analysis of the actors allowed to speak and represented as acting confirms that in RT and BBCW political elites and the nations they represent have a greater chance, compared to other actors, to define international politics and shape shared understandings of how international relations works and where it is heading.

No description available.

In the information age, media has come to be recognized as a credible mean and foreign policy tool to pursue soft power. Authoritarian states like Russia are competing in the realm of ideas through state-funded news outlets such as Russia Today (RT). This by reaching out to global and foreign public spheres and by reporting on an alternative reality of events, issues and problems. This thesis studies the role of the media news outlet RT as a mean to promote Russian soft power. This with a focus on how the channel attempts to persuade and attract an international audience based on the construction of a compelling narrative. To approach this theme empirically, a media frame analysis is conducted utilizing five news frames including; morality, human interest, responsibility, conflict and economic consequences. The overall results suggest that RT attracts and persuades largely by providing an alternative Russian perspective on events, issues or problems. It attracts by appealing both in the direction of the western- and eastern world. It appeals to the west by emphasizing how the West needs Russia to find answers to the pressing issues in global politics. It appeals to the east by suggesting an alternative model of development. RT attempts to persuade are made through the construction of counter-narratives which delegitimizes the Western approach in international affairs. The channel devotes efforts to boost these narratives by selective news porting and handpicking statements made by intellectuals from the perceived “other” western camp.

This diploma thesis called "Media framing of the Ukrainian conflict - articles comparison of German and Russian governmental servers concerning the theory of peace journalism" focuses on the extent, to which differ news coverage of Russian progovernmental webpage rt.com and German progovernmental webpage dw.com. It also researches how much these media contribute to potential escalation and de-escalation of the conflict. These results are gained by implementation of the concept of peace and war journalism into analysed articles. Thanks to quantitative and qualitative analyses methods, the research showed that the coverage of the Ukrainian conflict differs in both media. They vary primarily in the extent of contextual insight into the issue, in thematic contents of articles and in descriptions of parties involved in the conflict. Neither of these two media however can be associated with the practice of war or peace journalism according to the findings. They proved to choose certain aspects of the reality and increase its meaning in their articles, but the amount of such interventions cannot be interpreted as inclination to war or peace journalism.