Last week saw the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), which also marked the end of my six-year tenure on the AoIR Executive (serving two years each as Vice-President, President, and Past President). AoIR remains my intellectual home, and I’ve had a great time in these roles, even in spite of the additional pressure that these past two pandemic years and the resulting need to move our annual conference to an entirely online format have provided – I’ve worked with three excellent Executive Committees, and I’m particularly proud of the way that we didn’t just move …

The fourth presenter in this IAMCR 2019 session is Lemi Baruh, who shifts our focus to election press coverage in Turkey. Turkey has undergone a gradual process of political transformation, with growing government influence on the media, but media in Turkey have often been researched using convenience samples, and short-term studies; the present study addresses this by covering four national election campaigns from 2002 to 2015, and by using newspaper readership data and content analysis for 15 newspapers in the country.

Press-party parallelism theory suggests that commercial media structures often parallel political structures; media partisanship is also a positioning strategy …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 is Anastasia Kazun, who follows on from the previous presentation by focussing specifically on the countries that Russian media cover. Media influence public opinion about countries and their leaders, of course, because ordinary people will not have any direct experience of geopolitics – this is especially important in Russia, in fact, because most Russians have never travelled abroad.

The present study focusses on Russian press, TV, and online media, which tend to have different thematic interests and reporting styles. It studies the mentions of some 193 countries in Russian media, focussing on the …