Mediated Public Diplomacy Research Articles

A Theoretical Review of Mediated Public Diplomacy in China–Japan Relations

A Theoretical Review of Mediated Public Diplomacy in China–Japan Relations

Mediated Public Diplomacy and RT on Instagram: Role of International Institutions, Audience Engagement, and Online Account Bans

ABSTRACT Changes in the global media environment now challenge relationships between and within states. To expand understandings of mediated public diplomacy, this study examined 13,500 Instagram posts distributed on RT’s non-Russian accounts from September 2021–September 2022. It used LDA to identify RT topics across language accounts, explored the topics’ relation to UN statehood, examined audience engagement levels, and compared their frequency before and after major bans on RT content. The study found that more than two-thirds of the top 30 topics had direct relevance to the statehood frame. RT’s language accounts did employ unique audience-targeting strategies and situation-dependent emphases linked to the timing of their banned content, but the approaches varied according to which of the four statehood criteria were under discussion. High levels of audience engagement for statehood-related posts linked to each of the statehood definitional characteristics, but did not correspond to the frequency of the posted content. The study concludes with implications for mediated public diplomacy theory.

A Virtual Battlefield for Embassies: Longitudinal Network Analysis of Competing Mediated Public Diplomacy on Social Media

ABSTRACT Mediated public diplomacy is a critical way of strategic communication for governments to influence global public opinion, especially during international conflicts. Based on the theories of mediatization and digitalization as well as the layered model of communicative space, this study investigates how the United States and Iranian embassies competed on the Chinese social media platform Sina Weibo over 13 months. Following a network ethnography approach, this study conducts longitudinal network analysis and textual analysis. The findings suggest that the macro-layer function (i.e. hashtag) facilitated horizontal dissemination of news about the US-Iran conflict from mainly China’s state-media accounts, increasing public awareness of the issue within a short time. The meso-layer (repost and follower network) and micro-layer (mention and comment) functions helped establish vertical communication facilitated by opinion leaders and crowd-enabled leaders that perpetuated public attention on relevant issues. The two embassies engaged with the Chinese public in different communicative layers. The US embassy interacted with the Chinese publics through reposts and replies, while the Iranian embassy constructed their posts in the form of replies. The Iranian embassy leveraged China’s state media agendas as narrative agency to conduct diplomatic communication by incorporating relevant hashtags in their posts. A layered model of mediated public diplomacy is proposed. The findings deepen our understanding of competing mediated public diplomacy, and contribute to the field of international communication of international conflicts.

Mediated public diplomacy and securitisation theory: the US campaign against Chinese 5G in Brazil and Chile

Amidst the transition to the fifth generation of mobile telecommunications (5G), the US has launched a diplomatic campaign to prevent other states from acquiring such technologies from Chinese providers. In reply, China has launched a similar campaign to rebut being perceived as a security threat. However, the outcomes of such influencing campaigns in other states have been varied. This article argues that mediated public diplomacy and securitisation theory offer complementary ways to research the competition between the US and China in terms of influencing the policies of foreign states. Empirically, it examines the cases of Brazil and Chile, where the US campaign against Chinese 5G suppliers was successful in setting the agenda. However, neither the increased economic interdependence of Brazil and Chile with China nor their close political cultural congruency with the US, though, are enough to explain the different outcomes of the US campaign against Chinese 5G providers in each country. Indeed, Chile rejected the US securitisation move, while in Brazil it was successful, but partial in that it only refers to government 5G, not commercial 5G. The article argues that the degree of consensus among national political elites and other non-state actors to endorse or reject the US narrative explains such differences.

Mediated public diplomacy and peace journalism: International public news agencies on the Syrian crisis

As the liberal international order has been falling, the heteropolar order coupled with politics of uncertainty has been rising. In this context, illiberal regimes of status-seeking powers have realized the value of public diplomacy to promulgate their versions of the “reality.” Those illiberal regimes’ adoption of public diplomacy tools (incl. international public news agencies) has generated discussions on theoretical and practical approaches to the field at the intersection of political science/international relations, media, and communication studies. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to contribute to the emerging literature on public diplomacy of non-Western illiberal democracies. With the assumption that those regimes' illiberal democratic characteristics will be reflected in their public agencies' coverage styles (e.g., monologic, conflictive, and unbalanced), the article raises the following question: How do illiberal democracies utilize international public agencies as public diplomacy channels? To answer this question, it compares framing strategies (peace/war journalism) of the Russian TASS and the Turkish Anatolian Agency public agencies during the Syrian crisis. The findings reveal that those illiberal regimes’ public agencies have reported the crisis as a state-centric monolog in conflict with the West by distrupting the global public good (i.e., peace).

Mediated Public Diplomacy: Frame-building Contest Between the United States and Pakistan During a Conflict

This study examined the mediated public diplomacy (MPD) contest between the United States (US) and Pakistan in promoting their preferred frames in foreign media during a conflict: the death of Osama bin Laden. MPD is the process through which a nation constructs favourable frames and communicates them via the mass media to build a positive image in a foreign country ( Entman, 2008 ) and to promote its foreign policy. Using frame building and Entman’s (2008) theory of MPD, the study first content analyzed news articles published in The New York Times of the US and The Dawn of Pakistan and official releases published by the governments in the two nations to investigate frames they constructed about the death of bin Laden. Next, it analyses news articles published in the foreign media of Australia, India, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to examine the extent to which these frames were adopted by newspapers in these foreign nations. Analysis shows that the US-sponsored frames (government and media) dominated the foreign media in Australia, India and Saudi Arabia. However, in Egypt, the US was not successful in promoting its preferred frames. The study concludes that in contested public diplomacy over a single conflicting event, political and cultural proximities to a foreign nation do not imply that a nation will be successful in dominating the media of the foreign nation. The study suggests that MPD is a complex process that involves multiple factors and their interactivity that determines successful frame building in the international arena.

Mediated public diplomacy in the digital age: Exploring the Saudi and the U.S. governments’ agenda-building during Trump’s visit to the Middle East

This study analyzed the agenda-building capacity of political public relations messages of the Saudi and the U.S. governments during Donald Trump’s visit to the Middle East and scrutinized their influence on the media coverage and public opinion. The findings indicate that all three levels of agenda-building received solid empirical support from the data: governmental information subsidies significantly influenced media coverage and public opinion on the level of issues and stakeholders (1st level), their attributes (2nd level), and networked co-occurrences of issues/stakeholders (3rd level of agenda-building). Traditional information subsidies emerged as a powerful tool driving the agenda-building process. The study confirms the effective capacity of public relations communication to build the media and the public agendas in non-Western media culture and expands the applicability of the agenda-building network analysis research to the Middle Eastern media market.

Mediated Public Diplomacy Redefined: Foreign Stakeholder Engagement via Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned Media

Mediated public diplomacy literature examines the engagement of foreign audiences by governments via mediated channels. To date, scholars have examined the competitive contest between global rivals in promoting and contesting one another’s frames as reflected in global news media coverage. Recognizing the meaningful impact of social media platforms, along with the global rise of government-sponsored media organizations, the current study builds on previous mediated public diplomacy scholarship by expanding the scope of the literature beyond the earned media perspective to also include paid, shared, and owned media. The article presents a revised definition of the term mediated public diplomacy along with a case study of government to foreign stakeholder engagement via the social media platform, Twitter.

Deep learning for diplomatic video analysis

In this paper, we focus on putting Faster-RCNN into practice to solve the problem of diplomatic video analysis, as the part of Mediated Public Diplomacy. Diplomatic video uploaded by U.S. Embassy in China is our research target. Using Faster-RCNN, we get 56,781 object detection results from those diplomatic videos. Then we use statistical tools to test the abnormal distribution of the object category “person”, clustering the above results so as to analyze the hidden strategic purposes in these diplomatic videos. Then we give an abstract of these videos: they mainly focus on common people’s high-quality life in the U.S. Strategic purposes are: the U.S. takes advantage of the repeating occurrence of common people to make “people to people” diplomacy in order to win hearts and minds of audience. Attractive personal life is depicted in the video so as to build a strong, harmonious and happy U.S. national image. These procedures are elaborately designed, which is a latent agenda setting process, and a fruitful frame construction attempt. By this way, the U.S. successfully bridge the culture gap and accomplish its goal of global hegemony.

Constructing an image of the United States in the British and French editorials about WikiLeaks

ABSTRACTIn today's globalised world a country's image is an important consideration because it can influence that country's politics and economy (Shimko 1991. Images and Arms Control: Perceptions of the Soviet Union in the Reagan Administration. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Viosca Jr., Blaise, and Balsmeier. 2005. ‘Country Equity: South Africa, a Case in Point.’ Journal of Promotion Management 12 (1): 85–95). Scholars have noted that the news media are considered to be major players in creating national images and swaying public perception of foreign countries (Entman, 2008. ‘Theorizing Mediated Public Diplomacy: The U.S. Case.’ The International Journal of Press/Politics 13 (2): 87–102; Wanta, Golan, and Lee. 2004. ‘Agenda Setting and International News: Media Influence on Public Perceptions of Foreign Nations.’ Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 81: 364–377). The present study examined United States’ image typologies in news editorials in Britain and France. Using image theory as a theoretical foundation, this present study employed in-depth qualitative thematic analysis of editorials in The Guardian and Le Monde covering the release of classified U.S. diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks. The overarching U.S. image revealed by editorials did not exactly fit in with the normative images of ally, enemy, complex, imperialist, and colonial/dependent. It did, however, approach the complex image that entailed elements of the ally and imperial image.

Mediated Public Diplomacy of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria: The Synergistic Use of Terrorism, Social Media and Branding

This study aims to provide an initial theoretical model for understanding and analyzing the mediated public diplomacy strategy of virtual states. It examines the mediated public diplomacy strategy of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and its ability to synchronize terrorism tactics with communication strategies to gain media access and exposure, push news frames that serve its interests, and target stakeholders with a dual message using sophisticated branding strategies that resonate with cultural values and help it ultimately recruit supporters and deter foes.

The Second-Level Agenda-Building Function of the Xinhua News Agency

Mediated public diplomacy scholarship investigates the manner in which governments attempt to shape the framing of its leaders, people, and foreign policy in other nations’ media outlets. A growing body of literature identifies agenda-building efforts by these governments who often use state-sponsored media platforms to promote some issues and attributes as more salient than others. The current study provides a unique examination of China's use of its Xinhua News Agency as an information subsidy for US news outlets. Study results point to a limited transfer of issue salience between the Chinese news agency and the US news outlets. Non-significant findings were identified regarding attribute agenda building. The results of the study identify a significant intermedia agenda-setting effect between the US news outlets, with The New York Times serving as a conduit between Chinese and US news agendas. Results are discussed in the context of global political public relations and mediated public diplomacy scholarship.

Mediated public diplomacy: US and Taliban relations with Pakistani media

This article provides a unique perspective on US–Pakistan and Taliban–Pakistan media relations in the context of the regional war on terror. Based on mediated public diplomacy and news construction literature, the authors explore some of the key challenges and opportunities that both sides face as they aim to influence Pakistani media coverage and win the political support of the Pakistani people. Eighteen online interviews with Pakistani media practitioners explore their perceptions of wartime media relations involving five main categories: US–Pakistani media relations, Taliban–Pakistani media relations, Taliban/extremist groups’ understanding of Pakistani news routines, US officials’ understanding of Pakistani news routines, and social media/internet as sources of information for Pakistani journalists. The study’s key findings are discussed in the context of wartime media relations and mediated public diplomacy.

Mediated Public Diplomacy and Political Dialectics: 2010 Free Gaza Flotilla

In a networked world, national reputation management is an essential part of mediated public diplomacy and a unique part of intercultural communication. On May 31, 2010, the Free Gaza Flotilla breached the Israeli blockade off the coast of the Gaza strip which resulted in nine casualties. The purpose of this rhetorical analysis is to explore Israel’s attempt to manage its reputation during the incident. A Bakhtinian dialectical analysis was conducted to explore the conceptualization of political dialectics and to enhance the research on political grammars. The findings reveal the failures of public diplomacy when underlying tensions are ignored and when unwilling to negotiate through those tensions.

Relative Political and Value Proximity in Mediated Public Diplomacy: The Effect of State-Level Homophily on International Frame Building

This article applies the homophily thesis to public diplomacy and offers an empirical examination of a country's success in its mediated public diplomacy efforts. It analyzes international frame building, the process of creating or changing media frames in the international communications arena, by applying it to the case of Israeli mediated public diplomacy efforts during the war in Gaza in the winter of 2008–2009. The article claims that one way to use the homophily thesis in empirical analyses of international frame-building campaigns in conflicts is to measure the political and value proximity of a country promoting frames to other countries. Yet, proximity should be measured relatively rather than in absolute terms. Therefore, one should look not only at the dyadic proximity between two actors (i.e., Country A that attempts to promote its frames to Country C), but at the relative proximity between Countries A and C considering the proximity between the rival Country B and the target Country C. The study proposes a model and a method to facilitate empirical analysis of this claim. Using sophisticated computerized content analysis, our analyses demonstrate that relative proximity is related to successful international frame building in the hypothesized direction: The closer the relative proximity between Israel and a foreign country, the greater the acceptance of Israel's views.

Strategic Uses of Mediated Public Diplomacy

Using a newly launched U.S. tourism commercial as a stimulus, this pre/post quasi-experimental study empirically tests the bleed-over effect of tourism advertising on public diplomacy measures. Metrics for both tourism and public diplomacy objectives were obtained after the commercial was viewed by a large, nationally representative sample of Australian adults. Confirmation of the bleed-over effect was found. Subgroup analysis further explains how the commercial affected various audience segments. Practical and theoretical implications for the use of tourism advertising as a tool for mediated public diplomacy are explored.

Mediated public diplomacy: Satellite TV news in the Arab world and perception effects

Using Entman’s work on mediated public diplomacy, the authors conducted an Arabic-language online survey of news consumers on Arab websites, including one US-funded media outlet. They examined factors leading to gaps in exposure and perceptions of credibility for three Arab news outlets. Specifically, they examined variables that differentiated between exposure to and perceived credibility regarding the three satellite news media – al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya, and al-Hurra. Results showed that issue importance and attitudes toward the United States were significant predictors of exposure gaps between the US-funded network and other Arab media. Exposure gaps were also powerful predictors of perceived credibility.

“Do You Really Think Russia Should Pay Up for That?”

Mediated public diplomacy plays an important role in achieving foreign policy objectives by trying to influence public opinion in other countries. The Russia-based global TV channel RT serves as a central tool of Russian mediated public diplomacy. Its objective is not only to present the Russian perspective on different issues but also to propagate it. However, there is not much research on RT in general and none on the strategies RT employs to persuade its viewers of the rightness of the Russian stance. This article explores the use of persuasive strategies in the RT interview show Spotlight. A qualitative content analysis of 15 episodes, which discuss Russian relations to its Baltic neighbours Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, revealed that Spotlight constructed a one-sided pro-Russian reality. Various strategies are employed to hedge this reality against doubts about its trueness as well as to support Russia’s position in conflicts with the Baltic States. By this, RT aims to isolate the Baltic States internationally in order to help Russia in achieving its foreign policy objectives.

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

This study focuses on the competition over international agenda building and frame building as one central strategic activity of public diplomacy processes. It is the first analysis of a multi-actor contest over agenda and frame building in foreign media focusing on two strategic acts with evident mediated public diplomacy objectives and implications: Israel's disengagement from Gaza and the general elections in the Palestinian Authority. The success of the actors in promoting their agenda and frames in the U.S. and British news media is analyzed, revealing a complex media arena that includes the antagonists, foreign governments, and the media themselves as actors, each trying to promote its own agenda and frames. Cultural and political congruence between a foreign country and an adversary gives that antagonist an advantage over its rival actor. However, the antagonist actor still has to compete with the agenda and frames of foreign governments and media organizations.

Mediated Public Diplomacy in a New Era of Warfare

The new era of warfare is characterized by the increased visibility of war. The changing strategic, social and cultural environment has forced governments and armies to modify their strategies. Public diplomacy is one strategic policymaking response to this changing environment. This article reviews current research in this field, focusing on mediated public diplomacy, which is a central part of public diplomacy that has not been greatly researched. We discuss the central role played by cultural resonance in mediated public diplomacy, elaborating on immanent tensions between the centrality of cultural resonance and the needs of public, and mediated public diplomacy.