Media and geopolitical relationship: Framework analysis of operation olive branch

Paraphrasing Kaldor (1990), the way we describe the world, the words we chose, define how we see it and how we decide to act. By broadcasting events of different parts of the world, media can thusly contribute to its signification and to the construction of its actors, which may result in different representations of the same event by different media. Pertinently, Eytan Gilboa (2009) have suggested a multidisciplinary approach to analyze media by a geopolitical criteria: local, national, regional, international and global, expecting to verify discourse deviations of a specific local occurrence whithin these levels of media. The aforesaid approach, applied in this study to understand how was Operation Olive Branch framed, by the different media according to a geopolitical criteria, had the foremost ambition of discern its national and international representation regarding its introduction to the public, the description of its aims and the characterization of its actors, in order to understand if these three frames coalesced to present an unified contextual whole. For this, the 3 main questions of this essay are organized in 3 different micro cathegories that further are subcathegorized into macro cathegories, which corresponds to definitions of how the different media framed Operation Olive Branch according to each micro cathegory: Introduction, descriptions of aims and portray of actors. Accordingly, national and international media were examined in a two-month period covering between January 20th of 2018, the 1st day of Operation Olive Branch and March 20th of 2018, 2 days after the Turkish Armed Forces and Free Syrian Army declared victory. The results confirmed that Operation Olive Branch indeed differed between the levels of media, however, the most expected frames were found at the national level.