MEDIA FRAMING OF THE RUSSIAN DOPING PROBLEMS IN 2019 IN BRITISH, AMERICAN, RUSSIAN AND GERMAN MEDIA: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
Subject
Doping in sports - Russia ; Mass media and sports ; Broadcast journalism - Moral and ethical aspects ; Ντόπινγκ στον αθλητισμό - Ρωσσία ; Μέσα μαζικής ενημέρωσης και αθλητισμός ; Ραδιοτηλεοπτική δημοσιογραφία - Ηθικές απόψειςKeywords
RUSADA ; Russia ; WADA ; Media framing ; Public diplomacyAbstract
Media plays an important role in our perception of important events that influence the world.
Unfortunately, in 2015, Russia faced the biggest doping scandal in history and the country is still
suffering for the offense of anti-doping rules. In 2019 Russia had a chance make a comeback to
international sports, however, the country faced another four-year ban and has to recover its
reputation as a clean-of-doping country again. The world community demonstrated different
reactions on the issue – some felt pity about clean Russian athletes, some say that the punishment
was not sufficient, some were trying to find new features of political involvement. At the same
time, motivated by public diplomacy agendas, big broadcasting companies tend to show this
situation from particular angles and influence with their interpretation audiences abroad. This work
is dedicated to understanding how influential broadcasters from four different nations framed this
scandal for foreign audiences following their public diplomacy agendas – RT (Russia), BBCWN
(UK), CNN (US) and DW (Germany). This thesis applies a mixed methods approach, which
includes qualitative content analysis for manually detecting media frames of the broadcasters and
LDA Topic modelling for automated text analysis of the most frequent words and topics within
the media texts. As a result, I could detect 8 frames in four samples: four RT frames, two BBCWN
frames, one each CNN and DW frames. Comparing the frames, I found a number of differences
and similarities between the frames of different sources.