Content analysis on Russian media and conflict in Ukraine: from Putin’s third term to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

A review of the scholarly literature

Work-in-progress

This page is still a work-in-progress. It is shared in the spirit of keeping the research process as open as possible, but it still a draft document, possibly an early draft: incomplete, unedited, and possibily inaccurate. Datasets included may likewise not be fully verified.

Context

Approaches

Methods

Even in some of the most insightful academic articles on the evolving role of media in contemporary Russia, methods of analysis are not fully formalised. Tolz and Teper (2018), for example, do not offer any details about the method they used to analyse the change of formats and contents in Russian TV broadcasting after Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 from entertainment to agitainment.

Between 2012 and 2016, they identified four coordinated media campaigns.¹ Anyone following with any regularity Russian media will easily recognise these media campaigns, and will have noticed the increasingly ubiquitous presence on mainstream TV channels of the kind of “soft news programmes” such as political talk shows that can easily fall under the catchy label of agitainment. Yet, a more systematic or structured analysis may have showed additional or different dynamics at play.

There may be a complementarity at play: methodologically less stringent analyses likely facilitate the development of theories and hypotheses, which can be then tested and refined through more methodologically formalised analyses.

Tabular summary of key relevant studies

study	media analysed	source	method	dataset
Lankina and Watanabe (2017)	Russian main newspapers; TV transcripts; Russian news websites;Ukraininan Zerkalo Nedeli	Integrum	Latent semantic scaling; Word frequency	Not available
Tolz and Teper (2018)	Pervyi Kanal and Rossiya-1	“systematic following of the output of these two channels” / web – archives	Not formally described	Not available

Conclusions

As observed by La Lova (2022) in her analysis of scholarly publications on Russia, the opportunity to use digital datasets such as news archives “remain relatively untapped in scholarship” in this field. As she observes, in an increasingly authoritarian context where self-reported and survey data have additional reliability issues, and it is more difficult to conduct interviews and fieldwork, it may well be the time for scholars to explore more extensively contents published online and the digital footprints of Russian users, organisations, and institutions as potential sources of data and information.

References

La Lova, Lanabi. 2022. “Methods in Russian Studies: Overview of Top Political Science, Economics, and Area Studies Journals.” Post-Soviet Affairs, December, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2022.2162293.

Lankina, Tomila, and Kohei Watanabe. 2017. “‘Russian Spring’ or ‘Spring Betrayal’? The Media as a Mirror of Putin’s Evolving Strategy in Ukraine.” Europe-Asia Studies 69 (10): 1526–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2017.1397603.

Tolz, Vera, and Yuri Teper. 2018. “Broadcasting Agitainment: A New Media Strategy of Putin’s Third Presidency.” Post-Soviet Affairs 34 (4): 213–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2018.1459023.

Footnotes

1. “The first focused on the Pussy Riot affair and it ran from March to September 2012. This was followed by a year – long anti migration campaign that began in the fall of 2012. The annexation of Crimea and the so-called Ukraine crisis were the subject of the third intensive campaign from February to May 2014, and continued to dominate the media agenda until at least the end of the year. The fourth campaign covered Russia’s intervention in the Syrian Civil War, from September 2015 to May 2016.” (Tolz and Teper 2018, 217)