Randy Kluver

Chapter 4 examines Arabic language content, drawn from a variety of nations, of the 2016 US presidential election. This chapter provides quantitative and qualitative data regarding how continued US military involvement in the Middle East and the candidates’ rhetoric and stated positions on US–Middle East policy shaped coverage of the election. This chapter provides a brief overview of US–Arab relations and how these shape Arab media constructions of the US election, the legitimacy of democratic governance more broadly, and the most pressing questions of Arab identity and policy. Results affirmed previous studies’ depiction of the region’s dual culturally-positive/politically-negative narrative of the US, with Arab media narratives of democracy affirming its worth, despite US citizens’ reported disillusionment with the process. Arab media was critical of candidate Trump’s sexist and anti-Islamic rhetoric, yet supported his affectionate relationship with Russia as a means to end the Syrian war. Nevertheless, this alliance undermined US global influence by resonating with narratives depicting increased global multipolarity, limited US power, and rising Russian and Iranian influence.

Chapter 6 provides a synthesis of the project’s findings by comparing the similarities and differences among the three cases, implications for how media ecologies construct and legitimize strategic narratives more broadly, elements of what makes narratives compelling, and the implications for US soft power and the global order. While issue level narratives were primarily informational, providing detailed explanations of the US electoral and debate process and candidates’ campaign and debate rhetoric, these narratives contributed to national and international level narratives defining US values and challenges to US global leadership. Arabic narratives were most supportive of democracy, while criticizing US policy; Russian narratives overtly challenged US democracy and the US-led liberal order; Chinese media largely affirmed the international system, while contesting the universality of US democracy. Chinese and Russian narratives were especially “strong” relative to Arab media narratives, providing clearer visions for their community’s own political identity and future aspirations, resonating with their local political myths. All three regions’ narratives were legitimized through widespread inclusion of Western media reporting on the US election, aiding in their credibility as not state-driven or biased, but rather accurately transmitting what US media reported about its own nation. Finally, the chapter summarizes the contributions of this study for our understanding of strategic narratives, global media, and soft power. The portrayal of the collapse of the US system is accentuated by the portrayal of its hypocrisy, its inability to deliver upon its democratic ideals to its own citizens by failing to produce a campaign based on serious policy-driven, informed candidates who represented the will of the US citizenry. The convergence in negative narratives of the 2016 election by Chinese, Russian, and Arabic media likely stems from two interrelated reasons: first, all three regions are the targets of US socialization discourse; and second, they each have their own socio-cultural, situational aspirations distinct from US-Western norms which lead to diverging narratives relative to those told by the US. The most significant divergence regarding the narrative constructions of the 2016 election can be found at the national level. In both the Russian and Chinese cases, there is a much clearer juxtapositioning of US strength to that of their own than in the Arabic case.

Chapter 3 overviews the historical relationship between China and the US, including the role of US elections in shaping US–China policy, enduring issues of conflict between the two nations, and perspectives of the 2016 US presidential election from Chinese media. The chapter provides both quantitative and qualitative findings that shows how Chinese media demonstrated a strong interest in this election, but focused less on substantive policy issues. The chapter explores the key findings, including the focus in Chinese media coverage on the scandals surrounding both the US presidential candidates. Moreover, Chinese media coverage often cited the failings of US democratic governance, while juxtaposing narratives of effective Chinese governance and resurgent strength vis-à-vis the US. Taken together, Chinese media narratives showcase declining US soft power by challenging its moral and practical authority in articulating effective governance models, while legitimizing the Chinese leaderships’ policies in modernizing and governing China.

Chapter 2 argues that analysis of the 2016 US presidential election provides scholars with a unique site for study and comparison of global news media and explains the selection, similarities, and differences among the three cases presented in the book: China, Russia, and the Arabic-speaking world. This chapter contextualizes the media landscape of each region, providing a brief description of each region’s historical and socio-political relationship between the state and the respective media systems. This chapter also clarifies the differences between narrative analysis and framing studies, as well as providing details regarding the project’s research design and coding procedures. Elections, and US presidential elections in particular, are important political and cultural moments reflective of democratic values purported to be shared globally. Like many US citizens, international audiences come to witness the campaigning and discussion of issues primarily through media. Indeed, as Strömbäck and Kaid argue in their comparison of international election news coverage, mass media has become the main channel for political information, often serving as the locus of negotiation between a country’s citizenry and the institutions involved in government and opinion formation. Online, Chinese media influence tactics include controlling and monitoring systems such as firewalls, shutting down publications or websites, and jailing dissident journalists, bloggers, and activists. According to Krebs, when identifying dominant narratives, researchers must utilize multiple sources beyond official government pronouncements, because that narrative may not be shared by other sources or because other narratives may retain a legitimate standing.

Chapter 1 lays out the book’s theoretical argument and its contribution to the emerging field of strategic narratives scholarship by conceptualizing strategic narratives as a means to exercise soft power through its focus on the role of regional media systems as the source of narrative constructions. This perspective builds upon the work of Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, and Roselle (2013, 2017) on strategic narratives, answering their call for analyzing “the role of media in contributing to the meaning of events” and how “events come to possess narrativity for audiences.” This chapter examines how narratives about US democracy, the legitimacy of democratic processes, and characterizations of candidates and their policies are received and reconceptualized within foreign media systems. Theoretically, the project sharpens the definition of strategic narrative, and deepens our understanding of how “events provide the raw material for global contestations of the global order.” Further, this chapter explores how global media outlets interpret the same raw material but establish differing narratives explaining geopolitical events.

Chapter 5 contextualizes the gravity of the 2016 US presidential election for the Russia Federation, and its attempts at diminishing the legitimacy of US-led global democracy. This chapter overviews the mounting political tensions between Russia and the US, and the manifestation of those tensions in defining Russian identity and the threat posed to that identity by Western-led globalism. The US election provides an ideal theater for Russian media to bolster its own system, while simultaneously degrading both US soft-power and the legitimacy of Western democracy. US democracy is shown as globalist driven, inequitable, hypocritical, and an altogether messy, and even an unstable, affair; aiding, by way of indirect contrast, the authoritarian, more ethnocentric and stability focused leadership offered by the Russian state. US decision-making in virtually all areas of international affairs is shown to be just as deeply self-serving and flawed as its election process and its presidential candidates. The result is a picture of Western democracy that both destabilizes itself and, because of its inherent flaws, destabilizes the areas in the world in which it operates. Russian media used the election to create an image of itself as a survivor against Western corruption and a sensible alternative to US-led chaos. The outcome of a 2016 US presidential election, at least post-World War II, holds significance for nations across the globe as US policy typically guides most of the Western world and implicates virtually all sovereign nations across a broad spectrum of factors on global security, economics, trade, immigration, and humanitarian aid, to name a few. The path down which both nations have traveled to arrive at such dramatic shifts towards one another based on who assumes the office of US President, is a long one and is filled with incoming US administrations continually seeking a reset of relations with the Soviet Union, and now the Russian Federation. Reflective of the political developments covered, Russian media has recently become an active force attempting to shape domestic and international audiences’ images of Russia itself, as well as the US-led international order.

National media narratives often embody “strategic narratives” that embody national consensus on geopolitics. The 2016 U.S. presidential election was an event of intense international interest, both for its internal drama, but also for the policy positions of both of the major candidates. This paper presents a comparative analysis of how media in four key regions covered the U.S. presidential election and its immediate aftermath. Researchers utilized an innovative technology that allowed the teams to harvest media content, from almost seventy-five global news sources, in Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, and Russian. This paper utilized the theoretical construct of strategic narratives to demonstrate how the U.S. election is incorporated into narrative constructions of global order. Theoretically, this project seeks to deepen our understanding, from a comparative methodology, of how “events,” such as the U.S. presidential election, provide the raw material for global contestations of the global order. The essay also provides a mechanism for analyzing and evaluating these narratives using Fisher’s narrative paradigm. Finally, the paper demonstrates an innovative methodological approach to comparative analysis from disparate cultural and news traditions, languages, and patterns of access to media.

This study examines the strategic narratives embedded in Russia broadcast and news media to determine how the country advances a narrative framework portraying the Kremlin’s world view as propagated through Russian media. We argue these narratives help construct Russian identity in building domestic cohesion while fending off criticisms by Western nations. The study furthers our theoretical understanding of public diplomacy and global narratives by drawing from the work of rhetoricians and IR scholars in addressing how domestic and international narratives become tied together for strategic purposes and their reception by local actors. We analyzed 1016 broadcast and online news segments from 17 different sources representing governmental and official news sites, oppositional sites, and independent news sources. Two studies were conducted focusing on one particular ‘contour’ of the Russian worldview: Russian multilateral engagement through BRICS, SCO, and Iranian nuclear negotiations as well as media portrayals of NATO. The study concludes by discussing strategies for effective messaging.

The Internet has become an important element of political communication, as political candidates, parties, organizations, and citizens have used the medium for activism, commentary, and organization. The Internet is used to form and maintain political constituencies, mobilize political action, and infuse citizen commentary into political processes. Globally, the Internet is mobilized to support a variety of political and social movements, and is contributing to the formation of transnational political movements. Other nations are using the Internet to reach international audiences. But it remains in doubt how much politics or political communication might be changing in the era of the Internet.

Chinese leaders have attempted to alleviate international anxiety about its rise to global prominence describing its development as a ‘peaceful rise’ or ‘peaceful development’. Most recently, Chinese leaders have begun deploying a new term, the ‘New Style of Great Power Relations’ (新型大国关系). The purpose of this study is to examine the treatment of the ‘New Style of Great Power Relations’ as a political slogan within the Chinese media as a means to shape a geopolitical worldview among Chinese citizens and international actors. Researchers identified 541 articles from 25 different Chinese media sources selected to represent varying levels of government influence and editorial perspectives. This study found the concept primarily intended to engage the United States by stressing cooperative aspects of U.S.–China relations, but also challenges specific U.S. actions. Those U.S. policies challenged within the Chinese media are portrayed as inconsistent with the ‘new style’ concept’s principles. This forms a ‘rhetorical trap’, as it were for the United States, in that the framing of the discourse implicates U.S. intentions and policies as disingenuous unless the United States changes its policy stances. The essay examines the implications of the discourse for understanding Chinese political communication.

China's “Confucius Institute” (CI) project, which has sought to establish Chinese language programs around the world, has been widely criticized as strengthening China's geopolitical influence. This essay will examine the impact of the Ci project by drawing upon Castells's theory of cultural nodes, which explores the power dynamics between and among nations in a global, technologically oriented society. Specifically, the essay will argue that the Confucius Institute project's greatest impact lies not as a propaganda device, but rather in the attempt to develop a network of “Confucian nodes,” or sites of symbolic Chinese cultural capital, to enhance the geopolitical influence of China.

In contrast to the common view of blogging as a highly narcissistic activity, this study explicates how blogging is a communal activity and the emergence of a collective identity which drives collective action. 41 interviews with activist and nonactivist bloggers revealed that shared consciousness, distinctive blogging practices, and the articulation of a common adversary contribute to the development of a collective identity. Furthermore, identity multiplexity points to the emergence of “individualized collectiveness,” which extends beyond networked individualism and is reinforced by offline participation in activism and pre-existing social ties with other activists.

This article argues that data-driven research in global media has not kept up with the inherent interest in internationalization due to a number of factors, including access to global media and the lack of foreign language skills among many media researchers. Thus, the field still remains focused on analysis of Western media, leading to misunderstanding the geopolitical impact of global media. The article explores emerging media monitoring technologies which have arisen out of developments in natural language processing and machine generated translation. Finally, the article explores innovative research programs that utilize these technologies for global media research and education.