Description
Most of what we know about foreign events is shaped by the media we consume. This drives contemporary autocracies to employ their state-controlled media in an attempt to influence popular opinion both at home and abroad. What media strategies do they employ? What goals do they try to achieve with these strategies? Digital datasets along with the wide variety of methodological approaches enable us to attempt to answer these questions. Our panel sheds light on the variation in media narratives employed by Russian state-controlled media in relation to major international phenomena and events: COVID-19 pandemic, contemporary military conflicts, and the spread of conspiracy theories. The analyses rely on the archives of the major media outlets; methodological approaches employed by the researchers vary from novel NLP tools to in-depth qualitative discourse analysis. The research contributes to the literature on Russian foreign policy as well as general diversionary war scholarship.
