In midst of all international crises, NATO lacks a clear media profile

Coverage and tone 2001 – 2014

Rapperswil, September 2, 2014. Before this week’s NATO summit in Wales the media image of the Western defence alliance lacks a clear-cut media profile. Sparse coverage with mostly negative or ambiguous tonality does not shed light on the goals of the organization or help it to find support.

“The last time German opinion-leading media covered NATO positively was in the year 2002; the last lengthy report about the alliance focused on strikes against Gaddafi’s regime in 2011 in response to a U.N. mandate,” says Roland Schatz, founder and CEO of Media Tenor International. “NATO remains on the fringe of media interest in midst of crises from Ukraine to Iraq. Both the political sphere and the media need to consider why this is,” he added.

The sparse long-term media awareness for NATO is similar to the media’s limited interest in European institutions. Speculation about Putin’s intentions top daily TV news. Print headlines focus on contradicting reports regarding Eastern Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Gaza, and the delivery of weapons to the Kurdish Peshmerga, but NATO is not on the media’s radar.

For this study Media Tenor analyzed all 1,474 reports on NATO as main protagonist out of all 822,374 news reports in 10 German TV and print media; and all 448 reports about NATO out of all 309,735 reports about protagonists in 19 international TV news shows. The average inter-coder reliability in the second quarter of 2014 was 85.61 %.

For more information please contact: Dr. Christian Kolmer, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.