How online news media portrait Vladimir Putin differently during the Ukrainian crisis : comparative study of America and Chinese online news media

Abstract

Vladimir Putin, one of the most renowned worldwide characters in politics, is often portrayed differently in Eastern and Western news media, despite advances in the pace and interactivity of this medium (Matheson, 2005). The contradictory nature these media texts is particularly important, as they shape the public’s political and social knowledge by exerting “soft power” (Szostek, 2014) and “embedded value” (White, 2006). This dissertation is, therefore, designed to investigate how differing attitudinal elements towards Putin’s image are conveyed during a singular event, namely the Ukrainian Crisis. Combining the quantitative corpus-based contrastive analysis and a qualitative analysis under Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal framework, this research will illustrate the evaluative features of seven online news media outlets’ portrayals of Putin. Fairclough’s (1995) dialectical-relational perspective was also applied to the data provide a comprehensive account of the media’s dissimilar attitudes. The findings confirmed the extreme disparity between the American and Chinese news media coverage of Putin, and while both parties did acknowledge there was inappropriateness on some level from Putin and his counterparties, the Chinese media were found to be marginally more favorable towards Putin than their American counterparts. The findings suggest that the medium of online news in the information era is severely value-laden, and is heavily influenced by political, social and historical factors of the media outlets’ situational context.