Global Media and Strategic Narratives of Contested Democracy

Chinese, Russian, and Arabic Media Narratives of the US Presidential Election

Robert S. Hinck, Skye Cooley, Randolph Kluver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000012101
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In order to better understand how the world viewed the US 2016 presidential election, the issues that mattered around the world, and how nations made sense of how their media systems constructed presentations of the presidential election, Robert S. Hinck, Skye C. Cooley, and Randolph Kluver examine global news narratives during the campaign and immediately afterwards.

Analyzing 1, 578 news stories from 62 sources within three regional media ecologies in China, Russia, and the Middle East, Hinck, Cooley, and Kluver demonstrate how the US election was incorporated into narrative constructions of the global order. They establish that the narratives told about the US election through national and regional media provide insights into how foreign nations construct US democracy, and reflect local understandings regarding the issues, and impacts, of US policy towards those nations.

Avoiding jargon-laden prose, Global Media and Strategic Narratives of Contested Democracy is as accessible as it is wide-ranging. Its empirical detail will expand readers' understanding of soft power as narrative articulations of foreign nation's policies, values, and beliefs within localized media systems. Communication/media studies students, as well as political scientists whose studies includes media and global politics, will welcome its publication.

1

STRATEGIC NARRATIVES OF THE 2016 US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Contestations of US, Chinese, Arab, and Russian Soft Power Constructions

Introduction

The 2016 US presidential election was of tremendous interest to citizens of the US, as well as to observers around the world, with coverage being front page news for most news outlets around the globe. According to a commissioned study by CNN, 85% of survey respondents globally felt that the election mattered to the world, with 75% saying that it mattered personally to them. As Rani Raad, President of CNN International Commercial, stated, the report “shows the unprecedented interest in this year’s US Election—it has global reach and a mix of policy debates that have the potential to affect the world at large” (CNN, 2016).

There are many reasons for the global interest in the election. Obviously, the US president is the most visible symbol of the US to much of the world, and the policies that the President brings to the office have global ramifications. The US also has one of the world’s most robust media infrastructures, providing an almost limitless amount of content for other global media outlets. In addition, the US often sets the pace for electoral politics in other nations, with US style political campaign practices being replicated elsewhere, spread not only by widespread media awareness, but also by an army of US consultants who advise campaigns overseas. Finally, the specific policies of individual administrations potentially have important diplomatic, economic, and/or political significance, not just to the global order at large, but to individual nations. This is true whether the nation is an ally, rival, or even a neutral actor towards the US. With the possible exception of Britain’s royal family, there is no other political process that is more globally followed than the US presidential election.

But perhaps more importantly, the US election is not understood as merely a singular event. Rather, it is a symbol of US political values and processes, and global discussions on the merits of “democracy” often are framed in reference to what is modeled in the US. As McClory (2017) notes, the US is the only country in the world that places its former and incoming leader on a stage for millions to see, with the “Peaceful Transition of Power” being the very symbol of American democracy watched around the world. The US election process, in its entirety, is a demonstration to both internal and external audiences on how Western democracy functions, and its viability as a model for the rest of the globe.

The ramifications of global coverage are many, in that global perceptions of the US, its citizens, its political system, and its global role are often driven by media coverage of the US. As Joseph Nye (1990, 2004) argues, a nation’s soft power is very much impacted by perceptions of the political values and policies of a nation. If a nation’s political values are seen as admirable, then that nation’s “power of attraction,” or its ability to lead other nations, is enhanced. Likewise, when the nation’s political values are seen as dishonest, corrupt, or dishonorable, that nation’s influence in the global order declines. Because of this centrality of attention, the US election becomes a fulcrum by which to affirm, contest, and/or alter the existing global order, and the role of the US in that order.

Soft power, then, cuts both ways, capable of enhancing one’s image or hurting it. Furthermore, as a tool for international influence, it can also be turned against others. Indeed, soft power can be “surprisingly aggressive” (Price, 2015) and even viewed by target states’ elites and broader societies as hostile intrusions capable of threatening their own established societal norms (Szostek, 2017a). And, while the US has lauded the ideational supremacy of its democratic liberal values since the collapse of the Soviet Union, that vision of world order is being increasingly contested. Closely tied to this has been the significant investment by non-Western nations in particular to advance their soft power capabilities by developing their own international news agencies to both combat the dominance of Western reporting, as well as augment their own international influence (Hayden, 2012; Powers & Gilboa, 2007; Gill & Huang, 2006; Hartig, 2015; Saari, 2014; Soldatov & Borogan, 2015). This restructuring of our international media ecology has reshaped the arena, both internationally and domestically, on how global events are reported, consumed, and contested. And yet, with all of this, there are few studies that explore how non-Western media systems package and explain US politics to their citizens in order to affirm, contest, and alter perceptions of US soft power; furthermore, the information that US voters receive about global perceptions on its election process are typically anecdotal, incomplete, and arise from Western news reports. How then do other countries come to understand the issues, characters, and practice of US democracy? What stories are told about the US election and how do those stories impact domestic audiences understanding of their own politics? Finally, what implications might this hold for US global leadership and soft power? These are but some of the questions this book sets out to answer.

In order to better understand how the world viewed the election, the issues that mattered around the world, and how global media systems constructed presentations of the US presidential election, we examined global news narratives about the 2016 US presidential election during the campaign and immediately afterwards. To do so, we utilized the theoretical construct of strategic narratives (Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, & Roselle, 2013, 2017) to demonstrate how the US election was incorporated into narrative constructions of the global order, analyzing 1,578 news stories from 62 sources within three regional media ecologies (China, the Middle East, and Russia). We chose this method because the narratives that are told about nations are in many ways more important than the actual facts or truths about that nation. Truth, or validity, from this vantage point is considered as societally constructed and shared through story and is less concerned with attempted determinations of an objective reality. As rhetorical theorist Walter Fisher (1984, 1989) argued, humans are best understood as “homo narrans,” or the story-telling species. We use narratives to make sense of the world, to define ourselves and our values, to define our rivals, enemies, and friends, and to explain our actions, values, beliefs and, ultimately, to create truth.

Our analysis demonstrates how the narratives told about the US election through national and regional media provide insights into how foreign nations construct US democracy, and reflect local understandings regarding the issues, and impacts, of US policy towards those nations, while also offering views on their own perceptions of the international order and projections of national strength. In this sense, our analysis goes beyond framing and agenda setting analyses typically employed by international news research covering election reporting in that frames and discourse analysis lack the temporal and causal features that narratives possess (Miskimmon et al., 2013). Narrative analysis provides us with a sense of how these political communities draw upon past occurrences to make sense of the present 2016 election, as well as what policies are trajected to be most attractive, or unattractive, in service to their future aspirations and understanding of world order. As Roselle, Miskimmon, and O’Loughlin (2014) argue, the concept of strategic narratives provides researchers with a new perspective to understand soft power by focusing on when influence occurs or fails to do so, especially with regards to how influence works in our new global media environment.

However, beyond introducing the concept of strategic narratives as a more fruitful means to understand soft power, Roselle et al. (2014) leave us with little understanding, and empirical evidence, of the role regional media ecologies play in crafting and projecting these narratives. Indeed, as Flew, Iosifidis, and Steemers (2016) argue, the forces of technology and globalization have given increased importance to global media and their narratives, raising the imperative for scholarship aimed at better understanding the linkages of strategic narrative construction and the implications for soft power. Rather than globalization becoming a homogenizing factor of media, new technologies and the forces of globalization have strengthened the power of local, national, and regional media. These findings are supported by studies of international news coverage which argue that news providers are primarily organized as national news providers (Papathanassopoulos et al., 2013) with foreign news presented through the prism of national interest and identity (Nossek & Kunelius, 2012; Mody, 2010) leading to how foreign news is reported which varies greatly around the world (Aalberg et al., 2013). Thus, states, and their media systems, have increased power to pursue positive, or negative, regulatory interventions that help them control and manage media narrative in ways that better shape the story they want to see constructed on of a given event (Flew, et al., 2016). Consequently, we can expect that, rather than converging in meaning, a global event will increasingly take on drastically differing narrative forms depending on how it serves a local media system. This is especially true in countries adopting closer state-media relationships such as the ones our project analyses.

Even so, state actors are limited in their ability to project their strategic narratives in complete isolation from outside input in that strategic narratives operate “in a discursive terrain where the agencies of elites and masses are mutually constitutive” (Liao, 2017, 111); the narratives propagated by government officials or elites can fall short of effective influence if they fail to resonate with their target audiences, whether they be domestic or international. In this sense, strategic narratives are not simply one-way vehicles of mass manipulation onto a population, but rather rely on the complexities of shared meaning within an entire society in order to build a collective story that relays the truth of an event over to the population.

In a fundamental way, then, we take issue with the common definition of strategic narrative provided by Miskimmon et al. (2013) as first and foremost a rhetorical act, i.e., a narrative set forth to achieve a strategic goal. Our definition considers “strategic” as less about intention, and more about the role of a narrative in shaping the geopolitical worldview of an audience. In so doing, a strategic narrative defines the geopolitical reality, i.e., who are we? Who are our friends? Who are our enemies? What are our values? It is questions like these that provide meaning to geopolitical competition or cooperation, and define our ability to engage geopolitically at all.

As an analogy, the difference between a “strategic” weapon and a “tactical” weapon is that a strategic weapon is used to undermine an opponent’s ability to conduct war at all, usually targeting industrial infrastructure, command structure, and the like. In contrast, a “tactical” weapon is one for local, immediate utilization on a battlefield, and is not designed, or expected, to undo an opponent’s ability to conduct war at all, just stop an immediate attack. Likewise, a strategic narrative is a narrative with the ability to shape the geopolitical terrain, as it were, in defining the nature of the geopolitical world. A “tactical” narrative is one that is used to shape perceptions of an immediate issue, whereas a strategic narrative is much more foundational in shaping the perceptions of audiences as to the nature of the world itself. For example, a narrative about enemy soldiers conducting atrocities in a village is tactical, in that it undermines immediate perceptions of the current actions. As an example, in July of 2014, Russian news channels broadcast a false narrative about a young boy crucified by Ukrainian soldiers so as to portray Russian intervention in the Donbass region as a noble intervention. That narrative is tactical, in that it undermines any goodwill that Russians might have for Ukrainian nationalists.

By contrast, a narrative which posits that the current battle is part of long and epic war between “our people” and “the enemies of freedom” is strategic, in that it shapes the terrain on which the tactical battles will be fought; that of geopolitical worldviews. A narrative that demonstrates the century-long struggle of the Ukrainians to remove the yoke of the oppressive Russians is strategic, in that any particular event just reinforces the worldview.

A narrative about an event, then, is “spin,” i.e., it seeks to shape the understanding of a particular event at a particular point of time. A strategic narrative, by contrast, provides the context and meaning for interpreting not just a single event, but all events, in that it allows us to interpret the actions of a geopolitical actor not just by what they do, but by who they are. Was Russian intervention in Syria in the fall of 2015 an attempt to uphold an ally and preserve stability in a region that was quickly crumbling by years of civil war and US interference, or was it an attempt to undermine the US dominance of the region, as yet another example of Russian attempts to undermine the US-led world order? The definition of events is driven by the worldview the audiences hold as to the nature of the geopolitical world.

As Schumacher (2015) argues, the function of narratives relies on the public acceptance of policies and policy action whereby elites’ advancement of foreign policy narratives depends on more enduring structures of national identity discourse in which those narratives must be grounded. Although construction and dissemination of these discourses originate from elites in one or several states, they are expressed and codified in their media systems, thereby providing perennial boundaries for policy. Understanding the impact of strategic narratives in the formation of soft power, then, requires careful consideration of how these are expressed in national media, because “mainstream media simultaneously function as actors that voice particular narratives and as a conduit (and sometimes as a filter) for narratives put forward by a host of actors (including smaller media and new media organizations)” (Arsenault, Hong, & Price, 2017, 204). Thus, “it is in these mediated spaces that narratives are validated, contested, and ultimately made into reality” (Arsenault et al., 2017, 204).

Therefore, in the context of the 2016 US presidential election, this book sets out to contribute to the emerging field of strategic narratives in international relations and communication by conceptualizing strategic narratives as a means to exercise soft power at home and abroad through its focus on the role of national media systems as the source of narrative constructions in countries more antagonistic to US policies that possess closer-state media relationships. We focused our attention on three areas that are outside the club, as it were, of the Western media system of press agencies, outlets, and governments, and instead drew our data from two countries (China and Russia) and one linguistic region (the Arabic-speaking region of the Middle East) that do not typically share the political, economic, or cultural traditions of the West, and are thus likely to have starkly differing views of the US and its political processes. In doing so, we help overcome the gap in studies of non-Western media that exists in current international communication research (Kluver, Campbell, & Balfour, 2013), as well as advancing our understanding of the role media plays in strategic narrative influence.

It is an error, of course, to argue that “the world” has one opinion about anything, especially anything as contentious and controversial as US politics. Not only are there great differences in the perceptions and perspectives of nations around the world, within any nation there are likely to be tremendous differences in the likability of a potential US president, the value of proposed US policies, or the likely impact of any president on ties between the US and that nation. Nevertheless, it is helpful, and conceptually necessary, to try to develop a broad understanding of the range of opinions within nations and among nations about the US election process and its outcomes.

It is equally an error, we think, to argue that global perceptions are irrelevant to the US and its citizens. As has been suggested by a number of scholars, international public opinion in some ways functions as a “new superpower” (Castells, 2008; Arquilla & Ronfeldt, 1999). It is true that non-US citizens do not vote, but US actions in the world are doomed to failure if other nations, and the political leaders and citizens of those nations, do not to some extent understand the rationales, beliefs, and values that drive US policies. On the other hand, even if US citizens do not consider the interests of other nations to be as important as their ow...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Strategic Narratives of the 2016 US Presidential Election: Contestations of US, Chinese, Arab, and Russian Soft Power Constructions
• 2. Research Design: Measuring Narratives Within Local Media Ecologies
• 3. Illegitimacy of US Democracy and Declining US Influence: Juxtaposing Chinese Success Among US Failures within Chinese Media Coverage of the US Election
• 4. Arab Views of the US Election: Culturally-Positive and Politically-Negative Depictions of US Democracy
• 5. The Crumbling Facade of US Democracy: Russian Resurgence Amidst US Moral Decay within Russian Media Coverage of the US Election
• 6. Compelling Narratives and the Implications for US Soft Power and the Global Order: Comparative Analysis of Chinese, Arab, and Russian Narratives of the US Election
• Index