Browsing by Subject "contextual objectivity"

The Syrian civil war was a byproduct of peaceful calls for moderate living and political freedom turned into an on-going devastation leaving behind traces of death, destruction and millions of refugees. While the Syrian citizens remain to be the main victims of this war, the media has played a crucial role in framing this crisis. Thus, the choice of investigating the Russian intervention can be attributed to the unprecedented involvement of Moscow in the Arab region. The involvement of both the U.S-led coalition and Russia gave the Syrian civil war a global status prioritising it as a crisis unfolding a new chapter in the world’s political order. Additionally, the social and political formation of Syria where the “breakdown of state institutions and the deepening communal rift" has often bred waves of violence and instability in the entire region. The primary aim of this study is to examine and analyse the framing of the Russian intervention in Syria as covered by Russia Today (RT) and Al Jazeera (AJ). It investigates the framing of different combatants involved in the war given the intricate nature of the crisis in Syria and the involvement of multiple global and regional superpowers and different politically and ideologically driven factions. In addition, the study investigates the sources incorporated by the two aforementioned news outlets while broadly looking upon reasons for the different coverage of the war by examining the historic and contemporary geopolitical formation of the region. It lays out the process of research design and data collection in the timeframe between September 2015 and January 2016. Subsequently, a background account of the establishment of RT and AJ is provided as a means of understanding the internal and external dynamics that unquestionably contribute in its agenda-setting. The literature review looks at concepts such as objectivity, credibility, source selection in addition to the emergence of user-generated content. As a background reference, the study examines the US invasion of Iraq and the reintroduction of embedded journalism. Similarly, the study compares the media portrayal of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and Syrian president Bashar Al Assad. The main findings of this study has shown that the introduction of user-generated content has played a notable role in this war as found by the examination of AJ which depended largely on the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights for its news stories. RT, on the other hand, opted for a traditional role by depending primarily on military sources.