My final session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore for today is on global conflicts, and starts with Nicole Marie Klevanskaya, whose focus is on Russian state-controlled and independent television reporting on acts of terrorism. This includes the 2024 terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall entertainment complex, which resulted in at least 140 deaths. This was Russia’s largest terror attack in years, and Putin quickly and incorrectly blamed Ukraine for it.
Russian media consists of independent and regime-critical journalists in exile, and state-controlled domestic media outlets that toe the official line. Studies on this media system often predate the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the crackdown on domestic media in 2022, and therefore provide only limited understanding and explanations of how the current media system might frame events of significant importance to Russia today.
So how did Russian media frame frame the context that led to the Crocus attack? This project conducted a visual and textual analysis of coverage in state-controlled Vremya on Channel One, and independent Here and Now on TV Rain in order to explore their framing approaches.
Channel One framed the attack as one part of an active American-Ukrainian threat targeting Russian citizens; this became more radical over time and increasingly aligned with government narratives. It claimed that Ukrainian agents were recruiting Russian citizens (especially children) for acts of terror. TV Rain, by contrast, framed the attack as one that Russia was misrepresenting, and covered Russian extremist media content from highly critical perspectives.
This shows the alignment of state-controlled media with the autocratic Putin government; meanwhile independent exiled media are increasingly critical, but in doing so also platform extremist Russian propaganda in order to criticise it – this may be because of their lack of access to official sources. Context in terrorism coverage can be weaponised for various propagandistic ends, therefore.
