Coverage of Other Countries in Russian Television and Newspapers

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 three most popular Russian TV channels and ten most popular Russian newspapers, covering some 26,000 TV stories and 39,000 newspaper articles. It draws on a range of variables for these countries to explain these levels of attention.

The U.S., Ukraine, North Korea, and Syria are most mentioned on TV, while the press focusses on the U.S., China, Ukraine, and Germany. Indeed, news stories about the U.S. are slightly more prominent in both press and TV than stories about Russia itself.

Various background factors may explain these patterns, especially for newspaper coverage; TV coverage is somewhat more variable, and this may be due to stronger government control of TV channels, while press coverage is more strongly economically driven.