1270 | 505 | Popular Geopolitics: USA in Slovenian Media | Boštjan Rogelj, Darren Purcell

Slovenians have held negative attitudes toward the United States for more than a decade, according to Gallup polls in the 2010s. Political analysts point to a variety of reasons. One of them is a negative image of the United States provided in Slovenian media. This paper examines how often and in what context the U.S. is portrayed in media reports on Slovenia’s two main news websites (24UR.com and rtvslo.si) between January 2012 and January 2022. While much of the coverage focuses on political issues and events involving the U.S. government, other topics that paint an image of the U.S. are also covered in dataset. _x000D_
The first section of the paper discusses the concept of soft power, limits to it, and how it is conveyed or rejected in the media landscape today. This is followed by a discussion of the data, explaining its sourcing and the subjective decisions made to create a ten-year corpus in such a way that the topics and themes can be analyzed by researchers. This is followed by a discussion of the predominant themes identified and why they were so prevalent in the dataset. We also highlight the range of international coverage and the outsized role the U. S. has in Slovenia media compared to other countries. _x000D_

Boštjan Rogelj, Darren Purcell
University of Ljubljana, University of Oklahoma

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ID Abstract: 505