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

About the event:

What do news media in Putin’s Russia reveal about the regime’s survival strategy? Using digital textual data sets from state-controlled television and online news transcripts and relying on natural language processing algorithms, I discover two general tendencies. First, I reveal that news reports that describe events originating abroad (and especially in Ukraine) was used by domestic media as a tool for distraction from domestic events and mass-media agenda setting prior engaging in a full-scale war. Specifically, I show 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. Second, I offer the evidence that better informed audiences were perceived by the state-controlled media in Russia as a challenge. These findings uncover important mass-media manipulation tactics in Putin’s Russia and add to the literature on autocratic resilience and news-media coverage of foreign events.

About the speaker:

Lanabi La Lova is a PhD Candidate at the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her dissertation at the LSE is an attempt to answer the question "What do news media in Putin’s Russia reveal about the regime’s survival strategy?" Methodologically, Lanabi is interested in data-science-based approaches in Political Science and International Relations. She also works as a research officer at European Institute, where she uses data science to answer the questions in justice interactions, peacebuilding, and political communication.

Registration:

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