Mediated Public Diplomacy: A Strategic Contest over International Agenda Building and Frame Building

Coverage of Foreign Events on US Local Television News: The 2006 Lebanon War

“…The war in Lebanon did not involve any US troops, did not directly affect any American economic interests, and was discussed and eventually resolved in an international tribunal (the United Nations). The distance of this issue from direct American interests limited the 'rally effect', which usually results in a unified position (Baum and Groeling 2010), while the involvement of the international community further increased the range of viewpoints presented by the American media (Bennett et al 2007;Sheafer and Gabay 2009). Second, the clear stance of the Bush administration on this issue allows us to examine how different media sources defer to the position of the administration.…”

“…Existing work on media coverage of Israel focuses on the representation of Israel in American and European newspapers (Daniel 1995;Segev and Miesch 2011;Viser 2003;Werder and Golan 2002;Zaharna 1995) or on American network and cable television (Sheafer and Gabay 2009). As with other areas of foreign affairs, coverage of Israel on local television news-the most popular news source of Americans-has so far defied any empirical analysis.…”

“…Recent developments in communication practices have further widened the range of opinions conveyed in the US media by making information easier to access and present. These include the formation of social ties between foreign correspondents and their foreign sources, the ability to employ new communication technologies to report instantly on events around the world, and the implementation of effective public relations by foreign nations (Bennett et al 2007;Sheafer and Gabay 2009).…”

“…However, as research shows, several aspects of the event and of the news source tend to expand the coverage to views beyond elite discourse. Referring to the attributes of the nature of the event, studies document the effect of an unexpected incident (Lawrence 2001); the ability of the government to control the political environment (Wolfsfeld 1997); the propensity to be a winner in a conflict (Zaller and Chiu 1996); the perception that the conflict is solvable (Cook 1996); the identity (US government or other) of the initiator of a specific event or policy (Sheafer and Gabay 2009); or key political policy decisions that drift to international institutions (Bennett et al 2007).…”

Automatically extracting frames from media content using syntacting analysis

“…Such "organized attempts by a government to exert as much control as possible over the way state policy is portrayed in foreign media" (Entman, 2008, p. 89) are called mediated public diplomacy. It is argued that frame building contests play a central role in mediated public diplomacy (Sheafer and Gabay, 2009;. The substantive goal of the case study used in this paper is to determine to what extent this mediated public diplomacy is successful, in other words, whether the frames used in Israel's internal messages are adopted by the foreign media.…”