Framing of political communication in the coverage of the Trump–Putin summit (Alaska, 2025)

Abstract

The article examines mechanisms of framing political communication in media coverage of the Donald Trump – Vladimir Putin summit held on 15 August 2025 in Anchorage, Alaska. The object of analysis is not the diplomatic event itself, but its media interpretations: the ways in which political events are encoded into frames, narratives, evaluative judgments and symbolic images. The study compares media messages produced in democratic media systems and in authoritarian political regimes in order to identify how regime type affects fact selection, emphasis, source hierarchy, lexical choices, causal interpretation and expected communicative effect. The methodological framework combines qualitative comparative content analysis, framing analysis and Harold Lasswell’s communication model. The empirical sample includes materials published by Associated Press, Reuters, The Guardian, Deutschlandfunk, ABC News, Daily Maverick, RIA Novosti, Xinhua, Global Times and IRNA during the immediate coverage of the summit. The political and media-system context is specified through the 2025 World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders. The findings show that authoritarian media framed the summit mainly as symbolic evidence of Russia’s return to the status of an equal global actor, as the collapse of Western isolation and as Vladimir Putin’s image victory. These messages were dominated by frames of diplomatic breakthrough, leader heroization, denigration of Ukraine and the West, and reinterpretation of the lack of agreement as political success. Democratic media, by contrast, framed the summit as an event with limited or no diplomatic outcome, emphasizing the absence of a ceasefire, the lack of transparency, risks for Ukraine and the need to critically evaluate the actions of their own political leaders. The main conclusion is that political regime shapes not only the content of media messages but also the mechanism of frame construction: in authoritarian environments, framing is subordinated to regime legitimation, whereas in democratic environments it is embedded in public scrutiny, competing interpretations and open debate.