Framing negotiations: How international mass media frame international-multilateral negotiations

This dissertation investigated the international news media's coverage of international multilateral negotiations. The research mainly analyzed news framing in news stories. The aim was understanding how the media utilized frames and if the topics and time impacted the news stories' framing. Based on Semetko and Valkenburg's work, the current study used MAXQDA to analyze 738 news stories from the CNN, Euronews, CGTN, and Press TV websites. The study chose two agreements reached through long-term negotiations between multiple players: Iran's nuclear deal, also called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and the Paris Climate Agreement. Twenty-three questions were distributed in five frames, including attribution of responsibility, conflict, economic consequences, human interest, and morality, to analyze every news story on the abovementioned issues. The main result suggests that the media focused on state players, and none gave significant weight to non-state actors in the two studied issues. The conflict frame was the most dominant in overall coverage. The responsibility frame followed only by a small margin. In either case, the framing process paid insufficient attention to human elements. The economic effect of the issues on ordinary people was underreported, and the humane aspects of the stories were almost ignored. The economy frame came third. Morality and human interests were the least used frames, respectively. However, the dominance of particular frames changed according to the topic and time period. Although differences were found between media outlets, their general approach to frame use was noticeably similar. The study suggests that differences in ideology and ownership did not significantly affect how the media framed the negotiations and events. As a result, despite the different players and interests, the media saw the negotiations and diplomatic interactions mainly through frames of conflict and responsibility rather than the economy, human experiences, and morality. A classic case of international security, such as nuclear proliferation in Iran's case, did not get a significantly different treatment from a newcomer to the international relations arena like the environmental issue. Despite differences in framing based on topics, studied media generally treated both topics similarly by implying conflict and responsibility of the state players as the dominant frames.