Framing the Russia-Ukraine conflict in Chinese Global Television Network English
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51698/tripodos.2024.56.03Keywords:
Russia, CGTN, Ukraine, Journalism, International MediaAbstract
This article examines the coverage of the conflict in Ukraine on the CGTN English website during the first three months. Through a quantitative content analysis of 1,799 news items, this research identifies the predominant frames, social actors, and sources of information employed in the media coverage. The results reveal that the “diplomatic frame” predominates, followed by the “war frame”. The “economic frame” gains more prominence over time, compared to the “human interest frame”. Over these months, CGTN moves from an impartial descriptive approach to one that attributes responsibility variously to both sides, while striving to maintain a neutral overall position.
Downloads
References
Alpermann, Björn and Malzer, Michael (2024). “In Other News”: China’s International Media Strategy on Xinjiang—CGTN and New China TV on YouTube. Modern China, 50(2), 135-178.
Bateson, Gregory (1972). A theory of play and fantasy. In Isabel Caro & Charlotte Schuchardt (Eds.), Steps to an ecology of mind, (pp. 177-193). Chandler Publishing Company.
Berelson, Bernard (1952). Content analysis in communication research. Free Press.
Boyd-Barrett, Oliver (2015). Media and war propaganda. In Hoffmann J. & Hawkins V. (Eds.), Communication and Peace: Mapping an Emerging Field, (pp. 92-106). Routledge.
Bratic, Vladimir (2008). Examining peace-oriented media in areas of violent conflict. International Communication Gazette, 70(6), 487-503. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048508096397
Borah, Porismita (2011). Conceptual issues in framing theory: A systematic examination of a decade's literature. Journal of communication, 61(2), 246-263.
Breeze, Ruth and Novoa-Jaso, María F. (2024). Is this War? Naming the Russia-Ukraine dispute in three international news providers. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00092.bre
Chong, Dennis and Druckman, James (2007). Framing theory. Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci., 10, 103-126. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.10.072805.103054
D’Angelo, Paul (2019). Framing theory and journalism. In Vos, T. and Hanusch, F. (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of journalism studies, (pp. 1-10. USA) Wiley Online Library. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118841570.iejs0021
Daghigh, Ali Jalalian and Amini, Alireza (2022). Ideological manipulation in political news translation: An actor-network perspective. Journalism, 23(7), 1530-1547.
De Vreese, Claes. H. (2014). Mediatization of news: The role of journalistic framing. In Mediatization of politics: Understanding the transformation of Western democracies (pp. 137-155). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
De Vreese, Claes. H. and Lecheler, Sophie (2012). News framing research: An overview and new developments. The SAGE handbook of political communication, 292-306.
DiResta, Renée; Miller, Carly; Molter, Vanessa; Pomfret, John, and Tiffert, Glenn (2020). Telling China's story: the Chinese communist party's campaign to shape global narratives. Stanford, CA: Stanford Internet Observatory.
Entman, Robert. M (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51–58.
Flew, Terry (2018). Post-globalisation. Javnost-The Public, 25(1-2), 102-109. https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2018.1418958
Gillings, Mathew; Mautner, Gerlinde, and Baker, Paul (2023). Corpus assisted discourse analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Godefroidt, Amélie; Berbers, Anna, and d’Haenens, Leen (2016). What’s in a frame? A comparative content analysis of American, British, French, and Russian news articles. International Communication Gazette, 78(8), 777-801. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048516640482
Goffman, Erving (1974). Frame analysis: an essay on the organization of experience. Nueva York: Harper and Row.
Guo, Yingjie (2004). Cultural nationalism in contemporary China. Routledge.
Hamelink, Cees J. (2008). Media between warmongers and peacemakers. Media, War & Conflict, 1(1), 77-83. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750635207087627
Hoffman-Martin, Dorothea (2022). China's Balancing Act in Response to the War in Ukraine. In Paul A. Rodell & Cathy Skidmore-Hess (Eds.), Special Report: The Global South & Ukraine, (pp.41-47). Association of Global South Studies.
Kabel, Lars; Bodrunova, Svetlana; Jørgensen, Asbjørn S.; Mård, Anders; Naper, Anja A., and Nordström, Jonathan (2019). Russia in Nordic News Media Coverage of Nordic Countries in News Media of Russia. Nordic Council of Ministers, Danish School of Media and Journalism.
Kamyanets, Angela (2021). Evaluation in translation: a case study of Ukrainian opinion articles. In Journalistic Translation Research Goes Global (pp. 69-81). Routledge.
Kramar, Natalie and Ilchenko, Olga. (2023). Neologisms in the media coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war in the context of information warfare. Studies about Languages, (43), 14-28. https://doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.1.43.33284
Kilgarriff, Adam; Baisa, Vít; Bušta, Jan; Jakubíček, Miloš; Kovář, Vojtěch; Michelfeit, Jan; Rychlý, Pavel, and Suchomel, Vít (2014). The Sketch Engine: ten years on. Lexicography, 1, 7-36.
Kragh, Martin and Åsberg, Sebastian (2017). Russia’s strategy for influence through public diplomacy and active measures: the Swedish case. Journal of Strategic Studies, 40(6), 773-816.https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2016.1273830
Krippendorff, Klaus (2019). The changing landscape of content analysis: Reflections on social construction of reality and beyond. Communication & Society, 47, 1.
Kurlantzick, Joshua (2007). Charm offensive: How China’s soft power is transforming the world. Yale University Press.
Lai, Hongyi and Lu, Yiyi (2012). China’s soft power and international relations. Routledge.
Latif, Faiza; Zaidi, Shahza; Naz, Shahida; Idrees, Usman; Arslan, Muhammad; Yar, Shehr, and Ali, Shahzad (2024). Constructing The Other: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Ukrainian-Russian War In Western Press. Kurdish Studies, 12(3), 193-204.
Li, He (2015). Political thought and China’s transformation: Ideas shaping reform in post-Mao China. Palgrave Macmillan.
Lichtenstein, Dennis; Esau, Katharina; Pavlova, Lena; Osipov, Dmitry, and Argylov, Nikita. (2019). Framing the Ukraine crisis: A comparison between talk show debates in Russian and German television. International Communication Gazette, 81(1), 66-88.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048518755209
Lin, Jiayi (2022). Russian-Ukranian War: A comparative analysis of framing in Los Angeles Times and China Daily (Bachelor's thesis). Radbound University. https://theses.ubn.ru.nl/handle/123456789/12838?locale-attribute=en.
Liu, Zixiu (2022). News framing of the Euromaidan protests in the hybrid regime and the liberal democracy: Comparison of Russian and UK news media. Media, War & Conflict, 15(4), 407-426. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750635220953445
Liu, Zixiu (2023). News framing of the 2014–15 Ukraine conflict by the BBC and RT. International Communication Gazette. https://doi.org/10.1177/17480485231158904
Makhortykh, Mykola and Sydorova, Maryna (2017). Social media and visual framing of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. Media, war & conflict, 10(3), 359-381. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750635217702539
Matthes, Jörg (2012). Framing politics: An integrative approach. American behavioral scientist, 56(3), 247-259. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764211426324
McGlynn, Jade (2020). Historical framing of the Ukraine Crisis through the Great Patriotic War: Performativity, cultural consciousness and shared remembering. Memory Studies, 13(6), 1058-1080. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698018800740
Meng, Bingchun (2018). The politics of Chinese media: Consensus and contestation. Springer.
Miskimmon, Alister and O’loughlin, Ben (2017). Russia’s narratives of global order: Great power legacies in a polycentric world. Politics and governance, 5(3), 111-120. https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v5i3.1017
Nip, Joyce and Sun, Chao (2018). China’s news media tweeting, competing with US sources. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 13(1), 98-122.https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.292
Nye, Joseph S. (2022). Soft power: the origins and political progress of a concept. The Journal of International Communication, 28(1), 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1080/13216597.2021.2019893
Nygren, Gunnar; Glowacki, Michal; Hök, Jöran; Kiria, Ilya; Orlova, Dariya, and Taradai, Daria. (2018). Journalism in the crossfire: Media coverage of the war in Ukraine in 2014. Journalism Studies, 19(7), 1059-1078. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2016.1251332
Ojala, Markus and Kaasik-Krogerus, Sigrid (2016). Popular geopolitics in the shadow of Russia: The Ukraine conflict in Finnish and Estonian newspaper editorials. In Pantti M. (Ed.), Media and the Ukraine Crisis: Hybrid Media Practices and Narratives of Conflict (pp. 139-155). Peter Lang, New York
Ohlberg, Mareike (2019, December). Propaganda beyond the Great Firewall: Chinese party-state media on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Mercator Institute for China Studies, https://merics.org/en/comment/propaganda-beyond-great-firewall
Pantti, Mervi K. (2016). Media and the Ukraine crisis: Hybrid media practices and narratives of conflict. Peter Lang.
Peng, Weiying and Keane, Michael (2019). China’s soft power conundrum, film coproduction, and visions of shared prosperity. International journal of cultural policy, 25(7), 904-916. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2019.1634062
Ptaszek, Grzegorz; Yuskiv, Bohdan, and Khomych, Sergii (2023). War on frames: Text mining of conflict in Russian and Ukrainian news agency coverage on Telegram during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Media, War & Conflict. https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352231166327
Reese, Stephen (2007). The framing project: A bridging model for media research revisited. Journal of Communication, 57, 148–154. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00334.x
Richardson, Kay; Parry, Katy, and Corner, John (2013). Broadcasting Beyond the News: Performing Politics. In K. Richardson, K. Parry & J. Corner (Eds.), Political Culture and Media Genre: Beyond the News (pp. 17-45). The Palgrave Macmillan.
Roman, Nataliya; Wanta, Wayne, and Buniak, Iuliia (2017). Information wars: Eastern Ukraine military conflict coverage in the Russian, Ukrainian, and US newscasts. International Communication Gazette, 79(4), 357-378.
Scheufele, Dietram A., and Tewksbury, David (2007). Framing, agenda setting, and priming: The evolution of three media effects models. Journal of communication, 57(1), 9-20. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0021-9916.2007.00326.x
Semetko, Holli A., and Valkenburg, Patti M. (2000). Framing European politics: A content analysis of press and television news. Journal of communication, 50(2), 93-109. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2000.tb02843.x
Shambaugh, David (2015). China’s Soft Power Push: The Search for Respect. Foreign Affairs, 94(4), 99-107. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24483821
Sheng, Yang and Yelu, Xu (2022, February) China clarifies neutral stance as Russia, Ukraine poised for talks. Global Times. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202202/1253364.shtml
Spiessens, Anneleen and Van Poucke, Piet (2016). Translating news discourse on the Crimean crisis: Patterns of reframing on the Russian website InoSMI. The Translator, 22(3), 319-339.
Sun, Wenting (2022). Division of Chinese opinion on Russia-Ukraine War: Analyzing Key Actors’ Strategic Framing on Weibo. European Journal of Law and Political Science, 1(5), 48-56. https://doi.org/10.24018/ejpolitics.2022.1.5.45
Touri, Maria and Koteyko, Nelya (2014). Using corpus linguistic software in the extraction of news frames: towards a dynamic process of frame analysis in journalistic texts. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 18(6), 601–616. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2014.929878
Tuchman, Gaye (1978). Making news: A study in the construction of reality. Free Press
Valdeón, Roberto A. (2011). Embedding anglocentric perceptions of the world: The Falklands-Malvinas binomial in the news. Meta, 56(1), 63-80.
Van Gorp, Baldwin (2010). Strategies to take subjectivity out of framing analysis. In Paul D'Angelo & Jim A. Kuypers (Eds.), Doing news framing analysis, (pp. 100-125). Routledge.
Van Noort, Carolijn (2022). On the use of pride, hope and fear in China’s international artificial intelligence narratives on CGTN. AI & Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01393-3
Vliegenthart, Rens and Van Zoonen, Liesbet (2011). Power to the frame: Bringing sociology back to frame analysis. European journal of communication, 26(2), 101-115. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323111404838
Watanabe, Kohei (2017). The spread of the Kremlin’s narratives by a western news agency during the Ukraine crisis. The Journal of International Communication, 23(1), 138-158. https://doi.org/10.1080/13216597.2017.1287750
Wang, Jian (2011). Introduction: China’s Search of Soft Power. In J. Wang (Ed.), Soft Power in China: Public Diplomacy through Communication (pp. 1-18). Palgrave Macmillan.
Xu, Bangjun, and Tao, Yuan (2023). National Identity in Media Discourses from Russia and Ukraine: Amid the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War. Zeitschrift für Slawistik, 68(3), 419-439. https://doi.org/10.1515/slaw-2023-0021
Ye, Peilei and Albornoz, Luis A. (2018). Chinese media ‘going out’in Spanish speaking countries: The case of CGTN-Español. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 13(1), 81-97. https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.277
Zhang, Angel (2022). How is the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War Being Portrayed in China? [Conference]. 3rd International Conference on Educational Innovation and Philosophical Inquiries (ICEIPI 2022), Boston, United States.
Zhang, Yanqiu and Matingwina, Simon (2016). Constructive Journalism: A New Journalistic Paradigm of Chinese Media in Africa. In X. Zhang, H. Wasserman & W. Mano (Eds.), China’s Media and Soft Power in Africa: Promotion and Perceptions (pp. 93-105). Palgrave Macmillan.
Zhang, Yanqiu and Ong’ong’a, Daniel O. (2021). Unveiling China’s digital diplomacy: A comparative analysis of CGTN Africa and BBC News Africa on Facebook. Asian Journal of Comparative Politics, 7(3), 661-683. https://doi.org/10.1177/20578911211068217
Zhu, Yanling (2022). China’s ‘new cultural diplomacy’ in international broadcasting: branding the nation through CGTN Documentary. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 28(6), 671-683. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2021.2022651
Zhou, Yuqiong and Moy, Patricia (2007). Parsing framing processes: The interplay between online public opinion and media coverage. Journal of communication, 57(1), 79-98. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0021-9916.2007.00330.x
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Tripodos

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Once an article has been approved for publication in Tripodos, the exclusive right to publish the work becomes the property of Blanquerna School of Communication and International Relations of Ramon Llull University. These rights can be granted to a third party with the agreement of the author(s).
Until the articles have been approved for publication, Blanquerna School of Communication and International Relations of Ramon Llull University has no rights over them.
The submission of articles is understood to represent explicit consent to these conditions of publication.







