Between propaganda and public diplomacy: The framing of the Syrian conflict (2016) in Russian and American state-sponsored news outlets

Abstract

The current study examines the construction of media frames about the Russian intervention in Syria in the international news outlets sponsored by the US and Russian governments. A twofold comparison was drawn on the materials from the Russian and English-language versions of RT and Radio Liberty. The matching of the American and Russian news stories was carried out along with the matching of the 'domestic' and 'externalised' versions of these news outlets.
The fact that the Russian and American media framed the intervention in completely different ways was expected, but there were also noticeable dissimilarities in the various editions of each news outlet. The strongest distinction between the Russian and English-language news reports emerged in the framing of the humanitarian crisis in Syria and the attribution of responsibility.
The results were discussed in the light of public diplomacy and propaganda theories, which had partly predicted the findings (Taylor, 2012; Jowett & O'Donnell, 2014). The previous theoretical developments suggested that the political ideology and foreign policy orientation of a sender strongly influenced the principles of state-sponsored international broadcasting. The current findings point at other potential influences in the field, such as a local news discourse and the journalistic principles, which were developed in a specific media system (Roeh & Cohen, 1992; Jang, 2013).