What we see in Russia today is a dual media system, with independent and critical newspapers on one side vs. controlled and censored television channels on the other. The independent media are facing severe difficulties, and the accountability of the elected are nearly non-existing. The weaknesses of the judicial system allowing arbitrary exercising of the legislation against journalists, the increased control of media outlets both regional and federal, among television channels, newspapers and online media, lack of access to information, all are preventing the development of the media as the fourth estate providing a check on those in power. Journalistic practises, the heritage from the Soviet era and not at least the ownership structures are contributing to the development of a media system in favour of authoritarianism. Globalization has only a minor effect on freedom of speech due to increased control of the internet, and the capacities the authorities have shown to use globalization to their own advantage. The Russian media today are far more contributing to uphold an authoritarian regime than contributing to increased democracy.

In terms of both production and consumption, video games and gaming are a significant phenomenon in Russia, a fact acknowledged by the authorities and mainstream media. Although internet use in Russia has been a point of academic interest over the past few years, scholars have been slower to research video games despite their increasingly popular position in the media ecology of the region. Similarly, despite the abundance of theory and data on gaming in North America and Europe, game studies researchers have hardly skimmed the surface of the cultures, preferences and activities of gamers further afield. This dissertation investigates the online gaming sphere in Russia, presenting an empirical study of the industry, providing insight into gamers themselves, and analysing the media and political discourses surrounding gaming in Russia. In this study, I draw upon survey data, forum, website, and blog posts, user comments from gaming forums and analyses of local games to construct a picture of gaming activity and identity amongst gamers. In particular, I show how Russian-speaking gamers present themselves as members of a distinct subcultural group. Online gamers who participated in this study are shown to consume and discuss games in ways that can differ from elsewhere in the world, but they still retain common beliefs about the importance of expertise, taste and self-discipline within the gaming community. They display a great deal of knowledge about the games and communities available to them locally, while also consuming foreign games in selective and critical ways. For the reader conversant with game studies work, the dissertation constitutes a challenge to West-centric theories of gaming and gamers and demonstrates the importance of cultural context in shaping gaming practice. Throughout the dissertation, interactions between global and local, media and subcultural definitions of ‘gamer’ are crucial to understanding how gaming plays out in a Russian context. The self-definition of gamers differs greatly from mainstream media concepts of gamers. I contextualise discourses of the gaming self within an analysis of how the Russian media presents gamers as young people in need of moral and emotional guidance. Moreover, I show how contemporary media assessments of games and gamers have much in common with earlier moral panics about Western-inflected media and subcultures, such as rock music and style. Ultimately the gaming landscape in Russia is shown to be full of tensions, and the task of this dissertation is to identify, assess and compare these disparate discourses.

The thesis explores the state of European foreign conflict reporting by public sector broadcasters, post-Cold War and post-9/11. It provides a comparative analysis of the news values of three television news providers from three differing public systems: BBC’s News at 10, representing a British public service broadcaster, nominally independent of government control; Russia’s Vremya on Channel 1, a state-aligned broadcaster used, to a large extent, as a mouthpiece for the government; and France 2’s 20 Heures, a public service broadcaster, from a media system with a long history of state intervention. By investigating their reports, the study identifies and analyses the differing roles of public and state-aligned broadcasters. It examines the priority they place on certain values leading to particular aspects of a news story becoming news in one part of the world but not in others. The case study under investigation is a two-year period (2006-2008) from the ongoing Middle East conflict which both pre-dates the change in East-West relations and the events of 9/11 and provides a meeting point of many of the geo-political and post-imperial global struggles facing the three selected news reporting countries. The analytical chapters examine a peace conference, Israeli-Palestinian fighting and intra-Palestinian fighting, which reflect discrete aspects of this conflict and enable the broadcasters’ overarching and specific narratives to be considered. The thesis uses these events to assess relations between state and broadcaster and the attendant associations with the war on terror which emerge in the foreign conflict coverage. It investigates possible imbalances in the reports to the detriment of one of the warring parties and contributes to understanding how the broadcasters perceive their own and other countries. The study examines the broadcasters’ news values and agenda-setting techniques. By focusing on these two areas, which influence the shaping, length and positioning of broadcasts, news reports are analysed both quantitatively (e.g. running order, airtime, number of items per programme and subject matter) and qualitatively (e.g. the portrayal of news values and agenda-setting attributes displayed). The overarching argument illustrates that the hierarchy in news values is never arbitrary but can be explained, in part, by the structure of the broadcasters and by events occurring within, or associated with, the reporting country. As a result, the thesis investigations help identify nationally differentiated perceptions of conflict throughout the world and, in a broader context, contribute to studies in the areas of media, foreign conflict and Middle East conflict reporting.

The aim of this thesis is to contribute to theoretically sound concept of Peace Journalism, which combines theoretical foundations from two spheres: conflict and peace studies and media studies. Influence of journalists as intervening force and explaining factor with regard to (violent) conflict is neglected. However, Peace Journalism is not theoretically strong and builds upon dualistic definition vis-á-vis so-called War Journalism. The concept of Peace Journalism has to overcome this delamination in order to reflect theoretical underpinnings of conflict transformation theory and conflict analysis. Moreover, Peace Journalism has to differentiate media according to an involvement of given societies in a conflict. This offers an opportunity to specifically and accurately analyse news coverage of conflicts. Case studies analysing Czech coverage of Cyprus and Nagorno-Karabakh conflicts illustrates this approach. The coverage is essentially flat, distorts a reality of the conflict, pays attention to visual and physical aspects of the conflict and closes the conflicts in arbitrary time boundaries.

With the uprising of the Arab Spring in Syria in 2011, a myriad of news articles covering Syrian people' protests were published in the international media. However, it was after the Islamic State’s (IS) attacks on Syria and accordingly, Rojava region ​– the ​Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, de facto Autonomous Region ​– in 2014, that the region became the attention center of the international media. A considerable number of academic articles have analyzed the representations of the Kurdish female fighters in the Western media in different angles, such as the framing of the female fighters, their motivations, their roles in the war etc. There may exist a limited number of academic papers analyzing the Kurdish female fighters from the non-Western media perspective which might present a different picture from that of Western media analysis. Applying framing theory in combination with a qualitative content analysis approach, this study is intended to explore the Kurdish female fighters’ framing in Arabic, Kurdish and Russian media, namely Al-Jazeera, ANF and RT, respectively. Moreover, orientalism theory, feminist theory on militarization and war, and war and peace journalism theory are implied to investigate the framing of the kurdish female fighters in the three media.