Tag Archives: Tunisia

Libya Crisis Media Coverage: Who Uses Wikileaks Cables?

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Before continuing our analysis of the impact of Wikileaks on US Reputation, we include a new post directly related to the analysis of a political crisis of a country and the role of Wikileaks.

This post comes after our analysis of the media coverage given to the crisis and revolt in Tunisia and Egypt (plus a country analysis of Pakistan). We do not provide here the same line of analysis followed to study the Egypt and Tunisia case, as the main of this blog is not to provide a systematic analysis of Wikileaks impact, but just to show selected empirical results to interested readers, by using the approach and techniques developed at Media, Reputation and Intangibles center, MRI Universidad de Navarra.

The specific topic that we want to analyse in this post is how media from each country is interested in using Wikileaks cables related news about Libya when coverring the Libyan revolution. As explained in precedent posts, we check newspapers appearances from sources all over the world. We can thus cluster the results by country or by international region. We performed this analysis already, showing where did global media interest in Wikileaks cables come from.

Next figure shows the results concerning the origin of news about Libya using Wikileaks sources. This analysis is made by some 2,700 articles about the Libyan crisis citing Wikileaks.

In order to provide additional ground for analysis, we show the origin of all news related to Wikileaks, during the same period of Libya related news. This is all February 2011 period.

Comparing the results of both figures, we observe that US media are using Wikileaks cables more profusely when covering the Libya crisis. United States newspapers are respsobles for 31% of all Wikileaks news about Libya, while they count just for 24.8% of all news related to Wikileaks in general. We find that also Italy, a country with strong ties with the African country, takes a bigger share of all news related to the Libyan crisis using Wikileaks cables (from 4.5% to 6.0%). France is also another highly sensitive country. Also African countries cover in a higher extent the Libyan revolution using Wikileaks cables (a share of 1.9% against a general share of 1.4%). Asia and the Americas media (Ex USA) play a minor role and interest.

US Reputation and Wikileaks. (I) US Vs Spain Media Reputation

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US Reputation and Wikileaks. (III) The Impact of ugly brands

US Reputation and Wikileaks. (II) The Impact of Top American Brands

US Reputation and Wikileaks. (I) US Vs Spain Media Reputation

The main aim of this blog is to show how using the methodology and techniques developped by MRI Universidad de Navarra we can provide clear empirical insights of the direct impact of Wikileaks cables revealed on reputation. We have shown in precedent posts the impact of Wikileaks on the reputation of some companies, like Bank of America and Chevron. We have also analysed how Wikileaks portrays a specific media image of affected countries, like Pakistan, Tunisia or Egypt.

With this post we start the analyse of how Wikileaks affects internal and international reputation of the key player in all cables leaked: United States. It refers to US foreign policy through the actions, analyses and movements by US embassies and US State Department. t does not always refer directly to the US as a country, but many analysts consider that Wikileaks affaire may have asignfificative impact on the international image of the United States.

We are not yet able to estimate the mid and long term impact of this issue, but MRI Universidad de Navarra can provide a picture of how international media is actually covering the issue and how it relates to the United States. We will show in this and the following results the analysis of this question based in our date set and the analysis of the content of the printed news referring to the US and Wikileaks.

Before identifying how does Wikileaks affect United States image, we will present here how United States is perceived in the media using our approach. The results presented here refer all to the content analysis of articles published worldwide in English (including US media) referring in their articles explicitly to the United States. Period under analysis covers June 2010 to December 2010.

We show the US media reputation using the diamonds graphical analysis already used and explained in the case of Chevron and Bank of America. We just remember here that graphs indicate how similar are the news about the United States to news referring to each brand vector (like impressive, excellence, talented). The bigger the diamong, the higher the level of association of the US to a specific brand vector. In order to provide aterm of comparison, we show the results referring to the United States against those referring to Spain (again, based in articles worldwide written in English).

The following figures refer to some of the brand vectors, presented simply as example. According to our results, United States has a better 2010 media reputation than Spain concerning “Excellence”, “Acclaimed”, “Talented, Smart”, but Spain has a better position when considering “Impressive”.

One of the reasons why we have chosen Spain as example for comparison against United States of America media reputation is that we have estimated in another study how the FIFA Football World Cup 2010 won by the Spanish team did affected the international image of Spain. The global media impact of this sport event is so massive that is has definitively reputation implications by the organizing country (South Africa) and for the country winning hte competition. While in this blog we analyze the impact of a specific event like Wikileaks on the media reputation of countries, companies and personalities, we identified the reputation impact of a sport mega event in the mentioned study (Full report, freely available, is presently only in Spanish version).

In the mentioned study we identified a dramatical increase of Spanish media reputation in brand vectors related to emotional factors (like “Impressive”, “Acclaimed”, “Spectacular”). Those results referred to all international news about Spain, and not only those related to football or sports.

We shoe here the mid term reputational impact of this sportive success. We reproduce tow of the precedent figures, but we add in red colour the values reached by Spain in the first half of year 2010, before the sport competition took place. We clearly observe a substantial increase of media reputation for Spain for both the vector “Acclaimed” and “Talented, Smart”. Our results indicate that even if in these two vectors The United States outperform Spain in 2010, the gap was even bigger before the international sport success in South Africa benefited the international media image of Spain.

In line with this example, we will show in the following posts how different US brands affect international reputation of America, and later we will analyze the specific impact of Wikileaks

Egypt and Tunisia. Twin Wikileaks Stories? (and 3)

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Third and final post about the analysis of the Egypt crisis through the content of Wikilekas related news. In the precedetn post we found that some issues are clearly more related to the ongoing unrest and political crisis than to strictly the content of the cables revealed by Wikileaks. This appears clear again in the issues we show now, that seem to be strongly linked to how international media is portraying the crisis in Egypt, in comparison wo how it was explained when referring to Tunisia. Anyhow, we focus our analysis specifically to those news including Wikileaks as part of the explanation or source in the news article. In a future post we will show the differences of the storyline comparing all news to Wikileaks related news, using the Egypt case or other cases.

First three graphs contain issues that we identify as more closely linked to the description or interpretation of what the political context is in Egypt (and in Tunisia by comparison). As in the precedent posts, results help to show how media perceive each country crisis (comparative analysis), but it also offers clear insight of what are the “trending topics”, as the value taken by each issue tells us how frequently it has been used against other terms.

As always, we minimize the comments to the results. First graph indicates that the relevant foreign countries (Iran, Israel), are much more present in Egypt than in Tunisia. Egypt puts clearly the crisis inside the Middle East framework. As for the issues related to religion in both muslim countries, the concern about fundamentalism clearly predominates in Egypt related news.

Concerning the key players, the army plays a more relevant role in Egypt, while elections were more present in news about Tunisia.

It was quite surprising for us to find that foreign countries are much more present in the Tunisia crisis and Wikileaks news than in Egypt. It is also surprising to see that France acquires a minor role in English speaking media when referring to Tunisia. It is more balanced with the presence of other international powers in Egypt case.

Media play a relevant role in terms of prevalence in articles, but surprisingly enough, it is more important in Tunisia than in Egypt. Remember nevertheless that we are analysing here only Wikileaks news, and not all news.

Next graphs shows results concerning values and attitudes.

The final figure of this post refers to business oriented issues. They are in general much more present in the news about Tunisia.

Egypt and Tunisia: Twin Wikileaks Stories? (II)

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As a first complement to our precedent post concerning the analysis of the political crisis in Egypt relying on Wikileaks media coverage, we compare the news profile of Tunisia and Egypt to Pakistan.

In the previous post we have shown that media portrays a different storyline of Wikileaks information from Tunisia and Egypt. As we conducted the same analysis presenting the Pakistan case well before in our blog, the aim of this post is to merger the three cases to show the differences and similarities on how media analyses each country profile when using Wikileaks sources.

Applying the comparative analysis, we find that the focus when referring to Pakistan is terrorism and corruption, while human rights and dictatorship issues dominate in Tunisia and Egypt media coverage. We confirm once again that Wikileaks does not generate an uniform set of issues and cocnerns in term of media coverage.

Moving to the graph that we presented in the precedent post as more in line with the current unrest and political crisis, the comparative analysis confirms that the use of Wikileaks sources is somehow “contaminated” by ongoing local events. By comparison, “unrest”, “violence” or “revolutionnaires”, or even “freedom” and “crisis” are unrelated to Pakistan Wikileaks news profile.

Egypt and Tunisia: Twin Wikileaks Stories? (I)

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In a recent post we showed some empirical results about what we considered the first political crisis after Wikileaks revelation of secret US Department Cables. Tunisia opened the new era where media counts with official documents on how the US diplomacy evaluate the political situation in every country.

Now, a fast developing political crisis takes place in Egypt. Up to now President Hosni Mubarak has removed entirely his Government, and has announced that he will not present as candidate in the next general elections, September 2011. President Mubarak has refused to quit the Presidency and the country, as he considers essential to conduct the transition in order to avoid chaos. Demonstrators still urge President Mubarak demission. There are clashes between partisans and opposition to Hosni Mubarak.

At this stage of the political crisis, not still closed, we present the results concerning the pieces of the storyline of the crisis in Egypt based exclusively on the news directly related to cables revealed by Wikileaks. This is the same exercise we ran with the Tunisia case.

As both the Egyptian and the Tunisian case are apparently extremely close in time, the country profile and the inception of the political unrest and crisis, we propose to show the Wikileaks news on Egypt by comparison with the Wikileaks news referring to Tunisia. This expercise offers us a quite nice check of how media uses and gives interpretation to the content of US Department cables. As the cases of the two countries are rather similar for a foreign reader (and probably also for some journalists) unfamiliar with the reality of both countries before the crisis started, we can address here the research question: do international media portray a similar picture for Egypt and Tunisia when referring to Wikielaks sources? As we have pointed out in many of our precedent posts, we do not assume the mission to elaborate or propose theoretical models from any field before presenting the empirical results. Our goal is just to provide empirical results to interested scientist and readers, as raw material for their own analysis and consideration.

We show then how international media publishing in English explain the situation in Egypt and Tunisia using Wikileaks sources. We follow the same approach used to analyse the case of Pakistan. We have also included a third set of observations, referring to the news where both countries are explicitly mentioned.

The empirical analysis we show is based in content analysis of some 3.000 articles about Egypt (with explicit mention to Wikileaks),  2.000 articles about Tunisia and 900 articles about Egypt and Tunisia together. Values in the graph are relative, and reflect the quantitative weight each issue has in the storilyne of the crisis and the secrets revealed.

First two graphs refer to terms that we consider that are basically showing how media depict the country politics and the Government based in the leaked cables. These terms should probable be those more in relation with the content of the secrets and confidential information revealed.

Our empirical results suggest clearly that the country and Government profile depicted when using Wikileaks sources is not homogeneous at all, as the weight of some terms changes dramatically in Tunisia and Egypt. The most extreme case is “Corruption”. It appears as the most present term in the Tunisian framework, while it counts some five times less in Egypt. In coherence with this result, a similar thing happens with the terms “Scandal” and “Bribe”. In the other side “Human Rights” and “Accontability” has a higger prevalence in Egypt than in Tunisia. As for the underlying economic conditions, it does not appear a clear picture: “Poverty” issues prevail in Egypt media coverage, while “Economic Crisis” is more present in Tunisia related news. “Terrorism” does not appear to be a key player in both countries and take a similar media attention.

 

The following results are  more related to the description of the ongoing political unrest and crisis, according to our understanding. We find again a specific media coverage for each country, even if the relevant issues are basically the same in both Egypt and Tunisia.

News related to “Freedom”, “Unrest”, “Riot” and “Conflict” prevail when explaining the crisis in Tunisia. “Chaos”, “Revolutionnaires”, “Violence”, “Demonstration” and “Concern” are much more associated to the crisis in Egypt.

 

Tunisia Crisis as A New Use of Wikileaks Cables: Explaining and Judging

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Political crisis experienced in Tunisia, which at the moment has produced the eviction of the President Ben Ali, in power for 23 years, is the first one to happen after Wikileaks filtrations.

We show in this post some results concerning international media attention to this event. They clearly shows that at least in this case Wikileaks informations appear as part of the sources used to explain what is happening in Tunisia, and as a tool for the media in some countries to scrutinize the eventual role of the United States diplomacy in this country.

Using MRI Universidad de Navarra analysis tools, we count with the means to assess the extent of the present political turmoil, using the media coverage given to Tunisia worldwide. As explained in precedent posts, we capture and stock at MRI the information concerning the number of news referred to countries, companies or personalities, their geographical origin and their content profile. With this data base we produce media impact analysis like the one shown in the following graph. It refers to the media impact of Tunisia, measured since April 2008. As mentionned, it is estimated by identifying all press articles worldwide referring to Tunisia. A media impact value of 1 indicates that this country receives the same amount of news than the avearge of all 190 countries in our data set.

Our results show that the intrinsic media impact value of Tunisia is about 0.5 points. The time evolution of Tunisia media value allows us to identify the impact of any event in the recent history of this country. Present political crisis pushes international media coverage of Tunisia to a 6.5 points of media value, while the precent historical peak was just above 1 point.

In order to provide a term of comparison, our estimations indicate that the intrinsic media value of Chile is about 5 points. It reached a peak of 12.5 points in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, and 14.5 points around the sucessful rescue of the 33 miners (you can download here full report, in Spanish)

This result provides some perspective of the impact of the present crisis in recent history. It shows also that in many parts of the world Tunisia political, economic and social profile remained largely unknown as it was not a key media player. One implication of the current crisis is that it will not only have a substantial impact in internal political terms, but it will produce a lasting impact in its international media image: as quick as media focus is turning massively to this country right now, they will also vanish if the country succeeds in a peaceful transition. Which means that many people of the world will forge their image of what Tunisia is with the information gathered and reproduced by media during these days. We will show in this post that a significative share of this information is baked with Wikileaks cables.

First graph on Wikileaks shows the evolution of the Head of States Wikipedia Index values for President Ben Ali. Wikileaks news related to the President are barely absent till the end of the year. When civil unrest and demonstrations start, also news begin to be published using Wikielaks revealed cables. It rises to substantial values by January 5, and it explodes in the final stage of the crisis, reaching a value of more than 20 points (i.e. Ben Ali is subject of Wikileaks news in a number which is 20 times higher than the average of all head of States in the world).

We show an analogous result, but this time related with the Wikileaks Country Media Impact Index. The interpresation of the values is the same than before. Before the start of the crisis, Tunisia was almost no subject by global media to Wikileaks scrutinizing. Some news already appeared by mid December, but the presence of Tunisia related to Wikleaks did not increase till New Year, when the street disrupts started. Since then, the rise of Wikileaks sources in Tunisia crisis news is constant, and has exploded with the resignment of President Ben Ali, reaching an index value of 3.6 points.

Next graph shows a complementary information, that we apply to news related to Tunisia. It shows the rate of all news in the world concerning Tunisia that directly refer to any Wikileaks issue. By mid December, the wieght of Wikileaks filtrations account for 3 to 5% of all news about Tunisia. Last week worldwide attention to Tunisia crisis shortly decreased the weight of Wikileaks, but once the unexpected abandon of power by President ben Ali occurred, the use and the weight of Wikielaks data hugely increases and by now reaches a level of more then 7% of all news.

The share of Wikileaks issues with former President Ben Ali moved in the 10-20% range, which is considerably high. Is experienced a substantial increase at the beginning of the crisis, but the global media impact of his resignation has hidden the relevance of Wikileaks filtrations.

Next graphs show how the media in each country uses Wikielaks information in the storyline of the Tunisian crisis. The results are quite clear: local media have considered not appropriate to disseminate Wikileaks informations

First graph refer to media from countries in the region, and we compare it with the global average attention given to Wikielaks, as its presence is marginal, not even reaching a level of 2% of all news referring to Tunisia, while the global rate is 7%. Specially notorious is the low level of attention providen in the origin of the conflict, as less than 0.5% of news refer to Wikileaks.

In European countries the use of Wikileaks related in formation is also below global average, except for the case of Belgium and Turkey.

In other countries with weack geographical and political ties with Tunisia, we find that the share of Wikileaks news is in general higher. This is specially the case for US media, Indonesia and Canada. As pointed out at the beginning of this post, media from different countries use information from US State Department cables revealed by Wikileaks to cover the news about Tunisia political crisis.

As indicated in the title of this post, we find that Wikileaks is also used to judge or at least scrutinize US international policy and its particular role in Tunisia. In the following graph we show the weight of Wikileaks issues in news related to Tunisia and United States together. US media are those referring in a higher proportion to Wikileaks sources, with a share of more than 20% of all news. Interestingly enough, we find again that almost no mention is made to it by local media in the region: Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.