MEDIA FRAMING OF THE RUSSIAN DOPING PROBLEMS IN 2019 IN BRITISH, AMERICAN, RUSSIAN AND GERMAN MEDIA: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Abstract

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.