Project Framework, Justification, and Scholarly Contribution

The current project is grounded in the recognition that international communication, as a field, remains insufficiently international in scope, limited in the core questions it asks, the hypotheses it tests, the methodologies it employs, the themes it addresses, and the theories it prioritizes.The literature reviewed in “the Working Paper” points to key reasons behind the stagnation and the crisis of the field, highlighting its narrow focus and rigid boundaries as the primary factors. By integrating comparative international communication, international relations, and political communication, the project seeks to advance a genuinely cosmopolitan approach. This cosmopolitanism is reflected in the diversity of the thirty-three national research teams currently involved, with more joining over time. These teams represent a wide range of cultural contexts, educational and research traditions, and ideological perspectives from the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the U.S. The project focuses on the 2024 U.S. presidential election and aims to examine how political discourses and frames in news media reflect the nature of their respective states’ international relations with the U.S, ranging from confrontation and cooperation to dependency and independencey. It also explores how these discourses and frames align with the media- state parallelism  that ranges from high parallelism, low parallelism, independence, and counter-parallelism. Accordingly, the two chosen newspapers exhibit two key distinctions: they are the most influential newspapers and vary in the degree of alignment with their home states.   The project distinguishes between two types of discourse. “Reactive discourse” which is produced exclusively outside the state in which the newspapers just recycling or republishing it, whereas “proactive discourse” is generated internally reflecting the perspectives of the newspapers or state policymakers. The nature of each participating state’s international relations with the U.S., along with the degree of media- state parallelism within those states, serve as  predictors of the political discourses and frames published in their respective media. To measure these two independent variables, the Founder and Lead Principal Investigator (FLPI) Prof. Dr. Basyouni Hamada developed two four-point scales based on “Two Conceptual Notes” [Note1, Note2]: a nominal scale for international relations and an ordinal scale for media-state parallelism. The conceptual notes of the scales were reviewed by a specialized “Conceptual Notes Committee”chaired by Prof. Dr. Oddgeir Tveiten and including Prof. Dr. Abida Ashraf, Prof. Dr. Fatma Elzahraa Elsayed, Prof. Dr. Agnieszka Węglińska, Dr. Lucia Mesquita, and Dr. Islam Abdelkader Aboualhuda. The committee’s review led to revising the conceptual notes, resulting in improved versions of both scales. These revised scales serve as guiding tools for all reports submitted by the national research teams. Each national research team submitted two reports in accordance with the guidelines provided in the conceptual notes of the two four-point scales. Each report ranges between 700 and 800 words in length. A specialized committee entitled the “Reports Revision Committee,” consisting of eleven members and chaired by Prof. Dr. Arul Aram, reviewed the submitted reports. The committee members  include Prof. Dr. Fatma Elzahraa Elsayed, Prof. Dr. Abida Ashraf, Dr. Alexia Raquel Ávalos Rivera, Prof. Dr. Agnieszka Węglińska, Prof. Dr. Grisel Salazar, Dr. Carmen Beatriz, Dr. Lucia Mesquita, Dr. Islam Abdelkader Aboualhuda, Dr Mohamed Lafouairas, Mr. Mansour AlMuaili, and Mr. Huu Dat Tran.  The FLPI shared the review reports with the original authors who revised and resubmitted their final reports that have been uploaded on the metadata.  The “Reports Revision Committee” has significantly improved all reports submitted by the research teams.

Codebook Development and Validation Process

To assess the target content and discourses- the phenomenon under investigation- the FLPI developed a “Codebook” that has undergone several stages of revisions to achieve its validity.  In the initial stage, it was discussed with several scholars from the Department of Mass Communication at Qatar University, including Prof. Dr. Abdulrahman Al Shami, Dr. Hala Guta, Dr. ElSayed ElKilany, Dr. Abd Almotalab Makki, and Dr. Eiman Eissa, as well as Dr. Abdelsalam G Abdelsalam, from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Qatar University and Dr. Murad Alazzany from Sanaa University, Yemen. In the second stage, the codebook and its accompanying working paper were reviewed by Prof. Dr. Thomas Hanitzsch, Prof. Dr. Mohamad Elmasry, and Prof. Dr. Mohammed el-Nawawy. In the third stage, a self-nominated “Codebook and Training Committee” conducted a comprehensive review. This committee included Prof. Dr. Karen Arriaza Ibarra, Prof. Dr. Arul Aram, Prof. Dr. Abdulrahman Al Shami, Prof., Dr. Maria Diosa Labiste, Prof. Dr. Grisel Salazar, Dr. Shepuya Famwang, Prof. Dr. Murad Alazzany, and Dr. ElSayed ElKilany. The fourth and final stage of revision was carried out by 110 scholars representing national research teams from around the world. These successive layers of review have resulted in the current version of the codebook, whose categories are now well suited to efficiently fulfill their intended purposes as outlined in the working paper. The training sessions were guided by a detailed “Training Manual” and led to the development of a “Questions and Answers Guide”. To ensure a user-friendly Codebook, a Metadata Google Form was developed to submit the permanent data once by each national research team. The Metadata Form includes the state name, newspaper names, the nature of the state’s relationship with the U.S., the degree of media-state parallelism, names and roles of the national research team members, their email addresses, as well as the ownership and type of the selected newspapers. The Metadata Form was linked with the Codebook using specific data pieces. Both the Codebook and Metadata Form are designed to ensure that any analyzed election item submitted to the central project database is simultaneously submitted to the respective ‘content and discourse analyst” email. The codebook includes several categories pertaining the descriptive analysis of the 2024 U.S., presidential election, frames, and CDA, which is related to opinionated content only. Some of the categories have multiple options that “content and discourse analyst” can choose only one where others allows him/her to choose multiple options. The codebook has a filter question to distinguishing between “reactive discourse”, “proactive discourse”, “and a combination of both”or“not applicable”. The digital design of the codebook automatically directs the “content and discourse analyst” to the relevant categories based on their response to the filter question. The codebook involves eight categories, each requiring evidence to support the selected option. The purpose is to uncover underlying ideological structures, power relations, and discursive strategies. The aim is to determine whether the frames and discourse serve to legitimize or delegitimize the U.S. election, and whether it is portrayed as a model to follow or reject.

Codebook Reliability

While validation was ensured through multiple rounds of codebook revision enhancing the extent to which a it actually measures what it is intended to measure, reliability was achieved through intensive training sessions conducted for all national research teams under the supervision of the FLPI and the “Codebook and Training Committee.” Five training sessions continued for seven hours, established a standardized understanding among participants ensuring consistent results across the different content and discourse analysts of the different national research teams. These sessions also served as an opportunity to finalize the codebook in a user-friendly format and enhanced a shared identity among the national research teams.

Research Design, Pilot Study and Codebook Reliability

To further enhance the reliability of the codebook, a pilot study was conducted over a seven-day period- representing 10% of the total study duration from September 1 to November 10. Two independent “content and discourse analysts” analyzed the same content in the two-selected newspapers without collaboration. Inter-coder reliability (ICR) has been assessed using Cohen’s Kappa. The minimum agreement level accepted is 85% for any national team to proceed with analyzing the full study period. If the agreement criterion is not met, additional training between the two “content and discourse analysts” will be necessary before repeating the pilot study until reliability is achieved. The task of “content and discourse analysts” is to analyze all election-related content published in the seven days using the provided Google Form, submitting each piece individually. The Statistical Advisor, Dr. Abdel-Salam G. Abdel-Salam, Associate Professor of Statistics at Qatar University, and member of AB and his colleague, Mr. Nader Mohamed, the Managing Director will transfer the entries into SPSS, examine the reliability, and inform national research teams of the pilot study inter-coders reliability.    While the reliability test is confined to the quantitative analysis, Analyzing evidences attached to eight categories of the codebook ensure that CDA results are grounded in the textual analysis, rather than the personal intuitions, which help in increasing agreement among different analysts. At the end of the analysis of the study period in November 10, 2024, a “Quality Control Committee” will review Data Files of all national research teams. If they are found to be fraudulent or partially or fully fabricated, or if the analysis fails to meet the criteria outlined in the working paper, they will be removed from the consolidated database.

Project Uniqueness

The 2024 U.S. presidential election project is distinguished by several unique features. First, it represents a large-scale global collaboration among scholars from both the Global South and Global North, bringing together diverse areas of expertise. Second, it is the first comparative international project to integrate international communication with both international relations and political communication. Third, it initiates the exploration of causal mechanisms linking the nature of international relations between the U.S. and participating states with media-state parallelism in one hand and framing, and political discourses in national news media on the other. Fourth, it is the first project to define its two independent variables using two new distinct four-point scales. Fifth, it is grounded in two well-written, standardized reports that assess and categorize the nature of international relations and media-state parallelism. Sixth, it draws on a rich pool of conceptual frameworks, including the neorealist approach to international relations, the media-state parallelism approach, Wallenstein’s world-systems theory, and debates surrounding the flow and determinants of international news. Seventh, it is the first project to apply both “reactive discourse” and “proactive discourse” analytical frameworks. Eighth, it is uniquely dedicated to analyzing a global event of major geopolitical significance, the presidential election in the world’s most powerful state. Ninth, it is the first project with the potential to be replicated across multiple U.S. presidential election cycles, or adapted to other elections with substantial influence on international politics and relations. Tenth, the Advisory Board includes Prof. Dr. Thomas Hanitzsch (Chair of the Worlds of Journalism Study and President-elect of the International Communication Association, ICA) and Prof. Dr. Daya Thussu (Professor of International Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University and President of the International Association for Media and Communication Research, IAMCR). Their extensive expertise, particularly in comparative international communication studies, will significantly enrich the project’s outcomes. Finally, in line with the “Data Sharing and Publication Protocol”, all research team members are granted full access to the central database. This enables them to publish individually or collaboratively in leading journals, edited volumes, academic conferences, and special journal issues, with the FLPI having the right to be part of any research team’s publications, based on his actual contribution to its development and substance.