Propaganda in Dispute: A Comparative Analysis of Media Discourses in the Russia-Ukraine War, the Syrian Civil War, and the Korean Peninsula
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Abstract
This article comparatively examines media propaganda as a dimension of contemporary hybrid warfare in three settings: the Russia-Ukraine war, the Syrian civil war, and the Korean peninsula. Using a qualitative comparative case design, it analyzes a purposive corpus of 20 news items published by RT, BBC, Al Jazeera, SANA, KCNA/Rodong Sinmun, Yonhap, and KBS during critical event windows in each conflict. The unit of analysis includes headlines, leads, opening paragraphs, image captions, and quoted sources. The material was coded in two passes through a deductive matrix comprising four dimensions: naming of actors and events, causal attribution, moral characterization, and the visibility of victims and evidence. Findings show that outlets operating under different institutional regimes use comparable, though not equivalent, discursive operations: they stabilize legitimate vocabularies, shift responsibility, rank suffering, and turn credibility into a geopolitical resource. The article concludes that contemporary propaganda is not limited to falsification; it operates as a communicative infrastructure linking journalism, public diplomacy, and strategic legitimation. The study makes an analytical rather than statistical claim: the sample identifies discursive mechanisms but does not estimate their frequency across all coverage.
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