The Centrality of War for Russia’s Media abroad, 2008–2021

This study utilizes a mixed-methods approach to demonstrate the centrality of war for Russia’s media abroad. Linking organizational history, media performance, and big data, it emphasizes the challenges scholars face in conceptualizing this media as instruments of either ‘securitization’ or ‘information warfare.’ It draws from the organizational evolution of Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik, public statements by their editor-in-chief, and dissenting voices among former employees to evaluate the importance of Russia’s wars for these media outlets. Subsequently, the textual content of almost 1.8 million articles published between 2008 and 2021 is automatically analyzed to measure the dominance of Russia’s wars in their coverage. The results are evaluated for different languages and tested against the coverage of other topics. In the process, the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic is identified as a state of exception that defies the overall findings of the paper. Nevertheless, the results confirm that Russia’s wars in Georgia, Ukraine, and, to a lesser extent, Syria dominated the coverage by its media abroad from August 2008 to January 2020. Therefore, scholars must address the limitations and ambiguities of common conceptualizations to incorporate the centrality of Russia’s wars and acknowledge the perspective of their victims.