(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
Teun A. Van Dijk also advocated qualitative methods to analyze news, the text and the context
(Van Dijk, 1988). By employing coding, it was easy to see ‘relevance’ in the news on Georgia.
As Van Dajk (1985) highlighted in his article Structures of News in Press, the news has a
‘relevance structure’ which indicates which segment or topic is most important in the text.
This study presents only a modest attempt to analyze how the image of Georgia have been
developed within the English language media outlets, and its limitations should also be
considered in terms of a small sample size.
Major findings
The analysis have shown that while describing the Russian-Georgian confrontation the U.S.
media mainly focused on lack of experience of the Georgian military citing “Georgia’s
inexperienced military” or “Senior Georgian officials, a group of scant military experience.”
(The New York Times, November 7, 2008).
The data also showed that the media intensively focused on negative repercussions of the war
and especially, underlining that the war was a “disaster” for Georgia, however, reminding that it
shook the situation of both Russia and Georgia.
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