The GDELT Project

How Russian Television News Uses Western News Coverage To Advance Its Narratives

One of the many intriguing dimensions of Russian television news is how it leverages Western news coverage to advance its narratives by citing coverage critical of Ukraine's Western allies, from news directly relating to the war to contextual stories like inflation to domestic stories. Some are clips from US and European television news, while many are online news articles reproduced on air. The steady prevalence of Western news on Russian television news suggests logo detection of major news outlets coupled with onscreen text OCR and could yield fascinating findings by automatically tracking which articles appear where and in what contexts. Using the downloadable preview image ZIP files, such at-scale analyses would be relatively trivial to perform.

For example, a clip of a CNN broadcast about inflation in the US aired on Russia1's 60 Minutes show:

View Clip.

An article in The Guardian about Boris Johnson:

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A Bloomberg.com story about sanctions on Russia:

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An article in The Atlantic about Russia's ambitions:

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A Wall Street Journal op-ed about inflation in the US:

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