The Role of Intergovernmental Organizations in the “Battle over Framing”

Abstract

Current studies focusing on the media’s coverage of international conflicts have largely overlooked the important role that intergovernmental bodies may play in their framing. Still missing is an examination of how and to what degree do actions performed by such bodies help define the way journalists report on ongoing conflicts. We claim that in the absence of credible state actors to rely on for information during conflict, journalists will turn to statements made by international bodies as alternative sources of authority to shape their reporting. This study uses framing theory to examine how the United Nations General Assembly and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) became the primary definers for the international media during its coverage of the Israeli–West Bank separation barrier. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative content analysis, we examine the major news items related to the barrier that appeared between the years 2002 and 2011 in four leading newspapers in the United States and the United Kingdom (New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, and the Times). We determine what main media frames were being used during coverage of the barrier and point to the drastic change that occurred in their dominance following actions performed by the ICJ.

Content Analysis in the Research Field of Public Diplomacy

“…A recent meta-analysis of public diplomacy research demonstrated the increasing prominence of public diplomacy research across various research fields, with communication studies making up the highest number of public diplomacy studies since 1965 (Sevin et al 2019). Research in this field has mainly focused on analyzing how countries and their related entities are portrayed in newspapers or represent themselves over long periods (Metzgar and Su 2017;Golan and Lukito 2017;Rettig and Avraham 2016;Zhang et al 2016), during political (O'Boyle 2019) or sporting (Zhou et al 2013) events, or in times of conflict or crisis (Jungblut 2017;Sheafer et al 2014) in order to come to conclusions about agenda-building effects and implications for the perceived country image. However, only a few scholars have actually investigated the public and their reactions to public diplomacy communication efforts, or the relationships between public diplomacy actors and their publics, to show evidence of their interactions, for instance, on social media (Park and Lim 2014;Samuel-Azran et al 2019;Zhong and Lu 2013) and the construction of a country's image (e.g., through Google Search, see Ingenhoff et al 2020).…”

“…Public diplomacy research uses different research designs, including quantitative content analysis (e.g., Collins et al 2019;Lee 2007;Zhang et al 2018) and qualitative analysis (e.g., Avraham 2014) or, occasionally, a mixture of the two (Golan 2013;Rettig and Avraham 2016;White and Radic 2014). Although an increasing amount of potential research data, particularly social media content, has been examined using automated content analysis, to date, this method has only played a minor role in public diplomacy research (Huang and Wang 2019;Sheafer et al 2014).…”

“…Previous research has often conceptualized public diplomacy as one-way communication and, therefore, mainly analyzed traditional mass media outlets as the primary senders of country-related information (Bonomi and Pan 2013;Golan 2013;Golan and Lukito 2017;Metzgar and Su 2017;Rettig and Avraham 2016;Zhou et al 2013). Most of these studies focused on all sections of a newspaper, while a few scholars took a closer look at opinion-emphasizing newspaper sections, including the editorial and "op-ed" (i.e., opposite the editorial page).…”

“…Framing of country-related themes: Analyses of frames on public diplomacy communication have been broadly utilized, with the application of different approaches to framing (Golan 2013;Jungblut 2017;Yang and Taylor 2014). Some studies have applied Entmans' (1993) definition of frames by analyzing framing elements, including problem definition and problem solution (Golan and Lukito 2017;Jungblut 2017;Rettig and Avraham 2016). Others have used Iyengar's (1996) framing approach and examined emerging thematic and episodic frames (Metzgar and Su 2017) to detect how certain topics are presented.…”

“…Thus, future research could analyze how messages emerge, spread, and change within networks or which actors are involved in these dynamics. Therefore, future research should account for additional actors, including government and media actors (e.g., Rettig and Avraham 2016;Sevin and Ingenhoff 2018).…”