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Measuring Bias in International News: a Large-Scale Analysis of News

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Measuring Bias in International News: A Large-scale Analysis of News Agency Coverage of the Ukraine Crisis Kohei Watanabe November 2017 A thesis submitted to the Department of Methodology of the London School of Economics and Political Science for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 1 Declaration I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the MPhil/PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without my prior written consent. I warrant that this authorisation does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights of any third party. I declare that my thesis consists of 38,882 words. I can confirm that my thesis was copy edited for conventions of language, spelling and grammar by LSE’s Language Centre. Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Kenneth Benoit, for his advice and encouragement throughout my PhD study at Methodology Department. I am also grateful to Professor Tomila Lankina at International Relations Department, who taught me about international studies though co-authoring research papers. I also thank my family in Japan and friends in Europe; this thesis could not be completed without their support. 2 Abstract I present a new methodological approach to measuring news bias, aiming to settle the disagreement on how to define and measure bias in media and communication studies in this thesis. Unlike earlier research on TV news or newspapers, I choose international news agencies’ coverage of the Ukraine crisis in this study as a case to highlight the strength of the new approach. Utilizing newly-developed geographical news classification and sentiment analysis techniques, I analyse news coverage of the Ukraine crisis by Russia’s official news agency, ITAR-TASS, along with the independent news agency, Interfax, over two years to estimate partisan news bias resulting from state- ownership. In this longitudinal content analysis, I focus on the change in sentiment of ITAR-TASS’s news coverage of Ukraine relative to Interfax’s coverage during periods following six key events in the crisis. The analysis shows that the sentiment of ITAR-TASS’s news on Ukraine’s democracy and sovereignty changed significantly after key events, reflecting the desirability of these events to the Russian government. ITAR-TASS’s news coverage became the most negative when the new Ukraine government launched military operations against pro-Russian separatists in east Ukraine, claiming that the revolution was instigated by Ukrainian fascists, who threatened the safety of ethnic Russians. This result indicates that the Russian government utilized the news agency for international propaganda to justify its actions. Further, an additional content analysis including western news agencies revealed that Reuters’s news coverage of the Ukraine crisis during this period was strongly correlated with ITAR-TASS, being influenced by the Russian government’s false statements on Ukraine. Reuters news stories were circulated 3 internationally, and published in the most popular news sites in the United States without context. I argue that the publication of the Russian government’s false narratives by American online news sites through Reuters indicates the vulnerability of today’s international news gathering and distribution system, and the rapidly changing relationship between states and corporations in the global news industry. This suggests that western news agencies’ use of temporary correspondents in covering rapidly developing international crises increases the risk of spreading false information globally. In this case, western news agencies are, in effect, supporting international propaganda by non-western states. Keywords Foreign news; International news agency; Text analysis; Media globalisation 4 Table of Content Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 5 Measuring news bias: Russia’s official news agency ITAR-TASS’s coverage of the Ukraine crisis ................................................................................................................... 39 The spread of the Kremlin’s narratives by a western news agency during the Ukraine crisis ................................................................................................................................. 82 Newsmap: A semi-supervised approach to geographical news classification .............. 118 Big Media Analysis: Application of Vector Space Models to Document Scaling ........ 145 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 171 5 Introduction Objectivity in news reporting is one of the most extensively discussed topics in journalism, and many studies on bias in news have been conducted (Barkho, 2013; Donsbach & Klett, 1993; Maras, 2012), but news bias has been defined and measured in different ways depending on the structure of the media system studied (Hopmann, Aelst, & Legnante, 2012, p. 241). Aiming to settle this disagreement, I propose a new methodological approach to measuring news bias that is flexible enough to be applied even to the most polarized media systems. I choose Russia’s state-controlled news agency, ITAR-TASS, as a case, and estimate partisan bias in its news coverage of the Ukraine crisis in this study. The Ukraine crisis started in November 2013 as anti-government protests erupted in Kiev, triggered by the Ukraine government’s sudden announcement to strengthen economic ties with Russia instead of with the European Union. Pro-EU rallies in the capital grew rapidly and the protesters eventually ousted President Viktor Yanukovych in February after violent confrontations with the police. Russia responded to the collapse of the pro-Russian government by annexing Crimea in March despite strong condemnation from the new Ukraine government, as well as from the United States and the European Union. The crisis ended in mid-2014, but Crimea remains under Russia control and pro- Russian militants in east Ukraine remain active. The Ukraine crisis was not only an important geo-political event but also an interesting case for political communication research, because many news stories on the crisis were produced and circulated internationally, not only by the American or West European news media but also by the Russian media. The competition in covering the 6 crisis between the two sides has been described as an “information war” by media observers (Galeotti, 2015; Hutchings & Szostek, 2015). While the western media mostly reported the crisis as a democratic revolution against the corrupt regime in Kiev while focusing on Russia’s intervention on Ukrainian territory, the Russian media reported the crisis as a Ukrainian nationalist takeover that threatened the safety of ethnic Russians. Earlier results of content analyses of news stories on Ukraine (Boyd-Barrett, 2015; Freedman, 2014; McIntosh, 2015), which showed the Russian state-controlled media’s coverage of the pro-European Ukraine regime was very negative, claiming it was connected to ‘fascists’ or ‘nationalists’, also support the view that the Ukraine crisis was a propaganda war. As a result of propaganda from the Russian state-controlled media, confused western audiences perceived the Ukraine crisis as a conflict between Ukrainian nationalists and ethnic Russian minorities, a story tailored by the Russian government in order to have an excuse to annex eastern Ukrainian regions. Pomerantsev (2014) has even stated that Russia was “in control of defining ‘reality’”, not only domestically, but also internationally. In media and communications literature, the propaganda model refers to the collusion of states and corporations in spreading information via mass media to promote their own interests (Herman & Chomsky, 1988/1995), this being a different meaning from “propaganda” as a political message concerning enemy countries in wars (Jowett & O’Donnell, 2011). However, when the model is applied to the global news industry, it bears a meaning that is very close to the traditional sense of propaganda, or mediated public diplomacy, which aims to nurture a favourable attitude towards a home nation among foreign publics using communication media (Nye, 2008). In recent years, the Russian government has implemented strategic international communication by investing 7 heavily in its state-owned international media outlets (Lankina & Niemczyk, 2015). The establishment of Russia Today (RT) in 2005 was one such example, and the restructuring of its public diplomacy arsenal in 2013, which resulted in the closure of RIA-Novosti, was a move designed to enhance the effectiveness of Russia’s foreign propaganda. When Russia dispatched its special forces to Crimea and East Ukraine, the Russian government needed to justify its actions to the foreign public, thus it mobilized all its state-controlled international media. Such a combination of hard power (military) and soft power (communication media) is called “hybrid warfare” (Galeotti, 2015). Use of the mass media to promote western states’ political and economic interests has been highlighted by critics since the NWICO debates (Masmoudi, 1979), this line of argument culminating in the theory of media imperialism (Herman & McChesney, 1997; H. I. Schiller, 1991).
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