Opinion-Formation and Issue-Framing Effects of Russian News in Kyrgyzstan

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I found this paper from Michael McFaul's twitter feed, and found it illuminating. Long story short, Russian-style news propaganda has more effect on obscure, remote issues than on issues that viewers are familiar with. That's probably good news. At least in Kyrgyzstan.

Conclusions
For ordinary citizens, the media is the primary means by which they form opinions about the world. The media influences whether the public thinks about certain topics and how they are considered in popular discourse. It should not be surprising then that states attempt to persuade individuals in other countries to accept their worldview through the media. Russia has attempted more vigorously in recent years to influence public opinions in other countries, yet there is little evidence as to whether Russia's efforts in particular and foreign broadcasts in general actually affect views and thereby enhance soft power. We propose that foreign media broadcasts are most likely to have opinion-formation effects with respect to issues that are obscure (as opposed to ubiquitous) and most likely to have framing effects for topics that are remote from the daily experiences of foreign audiences (as opposed to familiar).

Our analysis of the impact of Russian television broadcasts in Kyrgyzstan supports these theoretical predictions. As a disconfirmatory most-likely case, an inconsistent or conditional impact of foreign media broadcasts on domestic audiences throws doubt on the effectiveness of media as a tool for soft power and public diplomacy broadly. Indeed, Kyrgyzstani citizens who watch more Russian news are more likely to have an opinion about obscure issues, but Russian broadcasts do not affect the likelihood of having opinions about ubiquitous issues. Russian media exposure influences how Kyrgyzstanis perceive US-Kyrgyzstani relations, Russian foreign policy, and whom they blame for the war in Ukraine—three issues that are remote from their daily lives—while there are no discernable framing effects in regard to assessments of Russian political institutions or Russia-Kyrgyzstan relations, both of which are more familiar topics in the lives of many Kyrgyzstanis. Overall, our results suggest that the theoretical framework we propose holds promise for the study of foreign media effects in other contexts.

Although we do find evidence of many of the effects we hypothesized, our study testifies as much to the limitations on foreign media broadcasts as a tool of soft power as it does to their promise. First, careful theoretical reflection suggests that the capacity of foreign broadcasts to actually shape opinions is most likely restricted to issues that are remote from the lived experiences of audiences. Second, foreign media must compete with local and other international media broadcasts for influence, limiting the extent of their impact. Thus, even in a context that would appear to be unusually favorable for framing effects, such as Kyrgyzstan with respect to Russian media broadcasts, we observe only a fairly limited impact. Logically, we would expect to see even more limited effects for foreign media that are less uniform and have a more difficult inroad than the context examined in this article. These results suggest that the influence of foreign media on domestic audiences is not as influential as many scholars and pundits appear to believe: if a most-likely case of Russian media in Kyrgyzstan—despite its dominant position in the country and relatively uniform media message—has only a limited impact on public opinion, we expect foreign media to have even weaker influence in less favorable contexts.

https://academic.oup.com/isq/article/63/3/756/5531758