Syrian War and Media Politics: Priming, Framing and Agenda-Setting

Waseem AHAD

Abstract
The Syrian war is about to enter its seventh year. Apart from being a theatre for great power political and military showdown, the war has been an object of international media competition. Meltwater, a United States-based media intelligence group published a report in late 2015 on digital and social media coverage of Syrian war, called Representation of Syria in International Media. The report covers micro and macro picture, comparing Syrian war with its contemporary, Ukrainian war, and then evaluates different aspects of the Syrian war’s coverage in top international media outlets during the period from 10 March to 10 September, 2015. Among many of its findings the report concludes that terrorism category holds the major share of media coverage – 30 percent – in the given time period against rest of categories, such as women, peace, children, refugees, politics and conflict in general.
This paper, by relying on the report’s findings, explores the underlying political role of international media, assuming that media throughout the war acted as a tool for contending powers to advance their objectıves, rather than as an independent agent; thus highlighting the media control mechanisms, as has been studied in the past. The theoretical tools — framing, priming and agenda-setting – enable us to examine the elite control of media and media’s control of messages. By contextualizing the highest proportion of media coverage for ‘terrorism category’, the paper evaluates the underlying assumption that media collaborate with contending political rivals, while do not lose their reputation of being biased.
Keywords: War, Syria, Communication,Media