Framing and biases in the press coverage of the crash of MH17 in Dutch and Russian state-owned news outlets.

The aim of this thesis was to analyze the framing practices used in state-owned media outlets during an international crisis. This was done by studying the crash of MH17 and the manner in which the Russian state-owned media outlet RT and the Dutch state-owned media outlet NOS framed the crash. In order to do this, a qualitative content analysis was chosen as method where 20 news articles from RT and 21 news articles from NOS were analyzed from the direct aftermath of the crash, which happened on July 17, 2014. A deductive approach was further taken to the coding of the articles, where the existing news frames identified by Semetko and Valkenburg (2000) were used: attribution of responsibility, human interest, conflict, and morality. From this analysis a clear overview of what framing practices were dominant in both RT and NOS was presented and what biases were present in the news coverage. The results revealed both similarities and differences in the way that RT and NOS framed the crash of MH17 that turned into an international crisis. Within the frame of attribution of responsibility there was a difference in the manner of the way that a certain blame was given to someone or not. For NOS there was a general narrative where no blame was assigned to anyone specific, as it was not clear who was responsible. For RT, however, blame was mostly put on the Ukrainian government. As for the human interest frame, there were similarities in the way that victims and relatives were mentioned for both the outlets, however this was not included too frequently. The frame conflict was quite present in the articles analyzed from RT, where anger and reproach were used often to signify that the fighting needed to be stopped or to criticize the mistreatment of the victim’s bodies. NOS also framed a few of the articles analyzed in a similar way, however the frame was less often present. Finally, the frame morality was not quite often used in the articles across both outlets, however there were a few instances where this frame was used to display a preferred behavior with regard to how to respond as a country after such a disaster. This was the case for both RT and NOS. From these results, biases were quite present in the case of RT, where RT actively put Russia’s actions in a positive light. As for NOS, biases were present to a lesser extent, with NOS trying to establish a balanced coverage of the crisis. However, there were still some occasions where NOS was biased towards the national interests of The Netherlands.