The Moscow Spin: Assessing Russia Today's (RT) Framing of Media Systems Across Languages

Abstract

By utilizing Hallin and Mancini’s four media systems criteria as a baseline interpretive lens, this study expands understandings of how Russian global media challenge existing international institutions. It illustrates how Russia Today (RT) frames Russia's media system vis-à-vis the West to online audiences. It examines 5 years of media-related posts (prior to Meta's ban) on RT's Arabic, English, French, and Spanish Facebook pages to reveal how audience engagement and post frequency related to media circulation, political parallelism, journalistic professionalism, and state intervention frames varied across languages and world regions. The study concludes with implications of RT's Western versus global south-targeting approaches and how they relate to the Kremlin's stated goal of creating a multipolar world.

Keywords

media systems RT Russia journalistic professionalism media markets political parallelism state intervention international broadcasting

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