Contesting Western narratives: BRICS media coverage of the Russia–Ukraine war

Special issue editor's introduction

When in 2021, I published a co-edited book with Kaarle Nordenstreng on BRICS media and its implications for global communication (Thussu and Nordenstreng, 2021), our friends and colleagues – old and new – were intrigued by why we were flogging a dead horse. Instead of dying a cruel death due to its internal and external contradictions and from noticeable neglect from the Western academia and mainstream media, the grouping has in fact grown, accounting for nearly 31 trillion dollars in total GDP. During the 2023 BRICS summit in Johannesburg, six new countries were admitted to the group: Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Argentina, and Ethiopia. Indonesia and Türkiye want to join, too, and there are many more in the queue.

Although in operation as a formal group since 2006 and holding annual summits since 2009, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries represent five large and diverse nations, with different political and media systems, as well as stages of development. Such a grouping, coinciding with the relative economic and geopolitical decline of the West, offers an opportunity for non-Western powers to influence the global media debate, hitherto dominated by the US and its Western allies.

Originally a Russian project to get large non-Western nations together in a geopolitical forum, BRICS was co-opted by China to demonstrate to the world at large that it was not the only one but also other emerging economies that were ‘rising’, so as not to scare the West. China remains the defining member of the group, which offers alternative geopolitical as well as financial perspectives, counter to the Western hegemony embedded in the international financial system through institutions like the WTO, IMF and the World Bank.

India's presence as a founding member of BRICS is seen with suspicion by both its fellow BRICS partners – Russia and China – as well as its allies in the West, especially the US. India's use of its presidency of the G-20 in 2023 as an opportunity to re-establish its credentials as an articulate voice for the global South (e.g. by ensuring that the African Union was given full membership of the G-20 at the summit in September 2023 in New Delhi) was seen by China as a potential threat to its own claim to be the leader of that global constituency (Jaishankar, 2020; Pardesi, 2022).

In financial terms, the creation in 2014 of the BRICS's New Development Bank as an alternative to the Bretton Woods institutions sparked the interest of many countries in the global South. Joining the BRICS might allow members to trade in their own currencies and reduce, if not end, their dollar dependence. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resultant widespread sanctions on Russia by Western governments and corporations have brought the issue of de-dollarization to the fore. Emerging as a ‘rising power de-dollarization coalition’, BRICS nations have been working on developing a new reserve currency based on a basket of currencies for its members (Liu and Papa, 2022).

This special issue of the journal examines the media coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the major news outlets in the BRICS nations. While the invasion has generated understandable condemnation and unprecedented economic sanctions from the US-led Western bloc and its allies, the reaction from Russia's BRICS partners has been muted. Unlike Russia, the media in the other four BRICS nations have refrained from calling the invasion a ‘special military operation’, and the coverage has been generally scarce and sketchy. For the West, the crisis is a major global geopolitical and economic challenge, while the BRICS countries see it as a European war, triggered by NATO's eastward expansion, and using Ukraine as a proxy to check Russian expansionism. For Europe, which has been at the receiving end of the invasion, which threatens its energy security and has triggered a refugee crisis, the invasion has revived debates about Russian imperialism.

Unlike the Western powers, the BRICS nations are demanding a peaceful resolution to the conflict. The Beijing Declaration issued after the 14th BRICS Summit in June 2022 explicitly noted that ‘we support talks between Russia and Ukraine’. Such an approach is in stark contrast to the US-European positioning, which has been to escalate and expand the conflict by arming the Ukrainian side in the conflict. In the past year, the US aid package, including military equipment/training and so on reached nearly $100 billion, while the European Union has also paid multi-billion dollars in this military-economic partnership.

As the articles in this special issue demonstrate, the framing of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in its extensive media coverage by the US-dominated Western media does not reflect the position of ‘the majority’ world on the conflict, as witnessed in the voting patterns at the United Nations General Assembly with regard to the condemnation of the Russian action. The BRICS countries make a relevant case study for the analysis of these differences in the framing of news: one of the founding members is the invading party and the dominant member, China, has close ties with Moscow, while India, Brazil and South Africa – though close to the West – take a more nuanced approach. The articles in this special issue of the journal written by senior academics from the BRICS nations, explore whether the BRICS media coverage of the conflict has made any impact on the global news space, which continues to be dominated by Euro-Atlantic narratives. The papers, initially presented at a panel of the International Communication Section of the IAMCR Annual Conference in Lyon in July 2023, have been expanded and updated.

Three of the papers included here emerged from a comparative study conducted by a team at Finland's Tampere University, to examine how the war was portrayed in leading television news networks in nine countries shortly after the Russian invasion (Nordenstreng, 2022). The news bulletins in each country were examined on selected 10 days during the observation period (24 February to 14 April 2022). The researchers noted significant differences in the amount, treatment, tone and angle of coverage across the countries examined. In his contribution, Musawenkosi Ndlovu, based at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, focuses on how the country's public broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) covered the conflict. He does it within the context of South Africa's ideological position on the conflict, especially as a BRICS member. Adopting this approach assists in evaluating if the SABC covered the war from an independent point of view or represented the position of the South African government, or if it framed the war through BRICS or Western lenses, concluding that SABC coverage was largely politically neutral, reflecting the geopolitical position of South Africa.

Svetlana Pasti from the University of Tampere examined the coverage of the conflict during the specified period on the evening newscast Vremya (Time), one of Russia's most popular news programmes. The overwhelming framing of the news on Vremya, she notes, was mainly presented from clearly articulated Russian angle, while the Ukrainian perspectives received miniscule coverage. Perhaps predictably, the sources of news too were almost completely dependent on the Russian authorities, represented by the president, the government, and the army. The third article drawing on the Tampere study included here deals with how Brazilian mainstream media covered the distant conflict. A team led by Fernando Oliveira Paulino of the University of Brasilia reported ambivalence towards the war as covered by the Jornal Nacional (JN), one of Brazil's most influential evening news programmes, produced by Rede Globo, the country's largest media conglomerate. Paulino and his colleagues noted that the coverage demonstrated a variety of perspectives on most of the news items, with the reproduction of statements and dramatic war images, though a majority of news items promoted a more balanced Brazilian perspective. The ambiguous position of the Brazilian government and the lack of interest among the population – dealing with a severe economic crisis and political tensions in an election year – demonstrated the distance between European reality and Brazilian perceptions.

The other three articles included here were originally commissioned for this special issue of the journal. In their article on how the mainstream Indian television news media – focusing on the privately-owned Republic TV, the country's most-watched, English-language television network – covered the war, Anilesh Kumar and Daya Thussu, both based at Hong Kong Baptist University, demonstrate the ambivalence and ambiguity in covering a controversial theme with deep geopolitical implications for a country with long and well-established relations with Russia (particularly in the energy and defence sectors), as well as growing ties with the West.

Geopolitical considerations are also central to the contribution from Deqiang Ji of the Communication University of China, who, with his team, examined how the conflict was portrayed by leading news media in China, drawing on the online databases of People's Daily, Xinhua News Agency, and China Daily collected for the year of 2022. The research shows that framing the news in terms of civilian suffering on both sides was one strategy to draw the attention of the domestic news audience and maintain the geopolitical stance of the government. The final paper in this special issue by media law scholar Elena Sherstoboeva, who is based at the University of Essex in the UK, focuses on the role of Russian state disinformation and propaganda in promoting and legitimizing its version of the conflict. Applying critical legal theories, she examines how Russia adopted and/or revised its disinformation laws and policies during the Russian–Ukrainian war.

Together, these articles articulate the need to examine a major conflict such as the Russia–Ukraine war within the context of global multi-polarity in the age of a ‘new Cold War’. Such formulations, we hope, can contribute to offering alternative critical perspectives on how the media reflects global power relations (Haass and Kupchan, 2021). Rather than dismissing non-Western geopolitical forums as insignificant or marginal to global communication, it is imperative for the Western-oriented academia and the media to ensure that in a polycentric world, such discourses are given the space and attention they deserve.