What do news media in Putin's Russia reveal about the regime’s survival strategy?

La Lova, Lanabi (2023) What do news media in Putin's Russia reveal about the regime’s survival strategy? PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

Using digital textual data sets from television transcripts and relying on natural language processing algorithms and statistical tools, this dissertation attempts to answer the question, “What do news media in Putin’s Russia reveal about the regime’s survival strategy?” It seeks to contextualize and address two important sub-questions: “Do autocracies employ state-controlled mass media in an attempt to prime domestic audiences for external wars of aggression?” and “How was the ruler covered by state-controlled media while the regime was getting increasingly centralized?” By focusing on the supply side of propaganda in a personalist autocracy with nominally democratic institutions, this dissertation adds to the literature on autocratic resilience. First, the dissertation reveals that news reports related to Ukraine ware used by domestic state-controlled television networks in Russia as a tool for distraction and mass-media agenda-setting. Importantly, the study demonstrates that attempts to prime domestic audiences for the war of aggression were occurring at the expense of reporting on domestic news. Second, the dissertation shows that throughout all the years in power, Vladimir Putin has been more frequently portrayed in positive stories, with the relative references to him not significantly increasing over time. Additionally, the dissertation demonstrates that during his time in power until mid-2022, the ruler has been more frequently mentioned in domestic news rather than in stories about foreign affairs. However, the study also shows that the share of news about foreign affairs and events abroad mentioning the ruler has been increasing every year since 2013. The dissertation is structured as follows. Introduction explains the relevance of the themes discussed in the subsequent chapters in addressing the question “What do news media in Putin’s Russia reveal about the regime’s survival strategy?” Chapter 1 “Corpora: Channel One, Russia-1, NTV, Channel Five, TVC, Zvezda, TV Rain, RBC, and Interfax” introduces 3 and contextualizes the corpora used in the dissertation. Chapter 2 “Ukraine on Russian Domestic Television: Media Agenda-setting and Distraction, 2009–2019” exposes large-scale evidence of attempts by Russian state-controlled domestic television to amplify for its audience the importance of the Ukrainian agenda in the years prior to the full-scale war. Chapter 3 “Vladimir Putin on Channel One, 1998–2022” addresses mass media coverage of Vladimir Putin on state-controlled television. Conclusion summarizes the findings, discusses the implications and limitations of the study, and suggests avenues for further research.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2023 Lanabi La Lova
Uncontrolled Keywords:	autocracy, autocratic resilience, news, Russia, Ukraine, Putin, television, personalist autocracy, personalist regime, mass-media manipulations, propaganda
Library of Congress subject classification:	D History General and Old World > DK Russia. Soviet Union. Former Soviet Republics J Political Science > JA Political science (General) J Political Science > JZ International relations
Sets:	Departments > International Relations
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4605

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