Contesting Strategic Narratives in a Global Context: The World Watches the 2016 U.S. Election

Abstract

National media narratives often embody “strategic narratives” that embody national consensus on geopolitics. The 2016 U.S. presidential election was an event of intense international interest, both for its internal drama, but also for the policy positions of both of the major candidates. This paper presents a comparative analysis of how media in four key regions covered the U.S. presidential election and its immediate aftermath. Researchers utilized an innovative technology that allowed the teams to harvest media content, from almost seventy-five global news sources, in Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, and Russian. This paper utilized the theoretical construct of strategic narratives to demonstrate how the U.S. election is incorporated into narrative constructions of global order. Theoretically, this project seeks to deepen our understanding, from a comparative methodology, of how “events,” such as the U.S. presidential election, provide the raw material for global contestations of the global order. The essay also provides a mechanism for analyzing and evaluating these narratives using Fisher’s narrative paradigm. Finally, the paper demonstrates an innovative methodological approach to comparative analysis from disparate cultural and news traditions, languages, and patterns of access to media.

Othering as soft-power discursive practice: China Daily’s construction of Trump’s America in the 2016 presidential election

“…Thus, it is a key player in China’s media-based soft power diplomacy. Meanwhile, we focus on the coverage of the US election not only because the election is ‘the very symbol of American democracy’ (Kluver et al, 2018: 3–4), but also because it has served as a performative screen onto which other countries, including China, project images about themselves (Kluver et al, 2018: 4).…”

“…The negative interdiscursive framing of Trump across many China Daily texts is not unique to China Daily or Chinese media (see, for example, Isakhan et al, in press; Kluver et al, 2018; Nord et al, 2017). In the case of China Daily , however, Trump-bashing is clearly a central part of the larger construction of the United States as the Other.…”

“…Similarly, the framing of US democracy as dysfunctional carries the implicit message that the Chinese political system or the China Model looks more desirable, or at least not as bad as some have suggested. Indeed, the ‘“soap opera” drama of the US election was used to vindicate the Chinese government’s approach to rule’ (Kluver et al, 2018: 17). And the critical spotlight shone on a divided US society represents an additional way of speaking about China as a more harmonious society.…”

The populist style and public diplomacy: kayfabe as performative agonism in Trump’s Twitter posts

“…As a 2016 presidential candidate, Donald Trump, already noted for his unorthodox social media skills, used Twitter to disseminate campaign messages and to co-construct a media persona rooted in a clearly populist style (Enli, 2017). Given the leading role of the US in international politics, wide reporting of the populist elements of Trump’s presidential campaign undermined the legitimacy of the US state as a global leader relying on the promotion of liberal democracy as a resource of public diplomacy, and gave diplomatic actors worldwide the opportunity to learn about the potential future orientation of US foreign policies, soft power statecraft and public diplomacy (Kluver et al, 2018).…”

Comparative international studies of election campaign communication: What should happen next?

“…If more of our studies additionally build a bridge between the Western and non-Western world – as Kluver et al (2019) have tried to do by analyzing the coverage of the 2016 US presidential election in Arab, Chinese, Russian, and Farsi news providers – we would do even better justice to the demands of truly international communication research.…”