Article
“Putin’s War of Choice”: U.S. Propaganda and the Russia–Ukraine Invasion Aaron Hyzen * and Hilde Van den Bulck * Department of Communication, College of Arts and Sciences, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA * Correspondence: ah3739@drexel.edu (A.H.); hdv26@drexel.edu (H.V.d.B.)
Abstract: The Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 ignited propaganda efforts from the U.S. executive branch of government and the U.S. media, as the country tried to position itself towards the war not just in the eyes of its citizens but of the entire world as part of its geopolitical power position. A comparative quantitative and qualitative analysis of official U.S. communications and U.S. partisan media coverage in the first week of the invasion aims to uncover how the U.S. government set the agenda and framed the events, and to what extent the media copied or diverged from this agenda-setting and framing. The results suggest a narrow focus and distinct framing on the part of the U.S. government, partly taken over by partisan media. The latter also touched on other topics that fit media logic and provided some counter-frames in line with their ideological positions, yet overall confirmed the dominant framing of the war as unjust, unprovoked and premeditated, as Putin’s choice, and the position of the U.S. as the leader of the free world and defender of democracy. Keywords: propaganda; war propaganda; government propaganda; agenda-setting; framing; Ukraine; Russia; U.S.A.
1. Introduction
Citation: Hyzen, Aaron, and Hilde Van den Bulck. 2024. “Putin’s War of Choice”: U.S. Propaganda and the Russia–Ukraine Invasion. Journalism and Media 5: 233–254. https:// doi.org/10.3390/journalmedia5010016 Academic Editor: Andreu CaseroRipollés Received: 10 November 2023 Revised: 17 January 2024 Accepted: 12 February 2024 Published: 21 February 2024
Copyright: © 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).
“American people are standing with the people of Ukraine as they suffer an unjustified, unprovoked, and premeditated attack by Russia’s military forces” (SD 2022a, 2/25, p. 2). When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, it ignited reactions around the globe. The U.S. had to position itself towards the war not just in the eyes of its citizens but of the entire world as part of its geopolitical power position. This study provides a comparative quantitative and qualitative analysis of official communication from the executive branch of the U.S. government and U.S. partisan media coverage in the first week of the war as a propaganda campaign, aimed at setting the agenda and framing the position of the U.S. towards the events with an eye to affect public opinion. A powerful means to tailor and control public opinion, propaganda is rarely more urgent and important than in times of war, for the countries having an armed conflict and for their allies and enemies. Propaganda has long been recognized as a forceful war weapon. For example, in the early 1930s, Poland proposed to the League of Nations to enact “moral disarmament”, specifically propaganda, seen to incite public opinion to aggression. The Soviet Union similarly proposed to ban “ideological aggression” (Murty 1968, pp. 233–34). Currently, the U.N.’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a key human rights treaty, states in Article 20, “Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law”. Regardless, war times are rife with propaganda as governments and media engage in their own and are wary of their enemies’ propaganda campaigns. At the outset of the Russian–Ukraine war, in early 2022 March, Russian media outlet RT News was deplatformed in many parts of the world to avoid Russian propaganda “polluting” minds or contradicting home propaganda (Roettgers 2022). Following suit, Russia banned and cut access to Western news media, including CNN, CBS, DW and BBC News (Sherwood and Milmo 2022).
Journal. Media 2024, 5, 233–254. https://doi.org/10.3390/journalmedia5010016
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