Expert assessments of Azerbaijan’s media image in Russian media

Section: Modern Journalism: Subjects and Issues

The image of a country is usually reconstructed from media texts: a corpus of publications is subjected to content analysis, and the image is recovered from the distribution of topics and evaluations. This article reverses the optics: it examines not media texts but the assessments and interpretations of publications about Azerbaijan made by the professional community. The empirical basis comprises 18 semi-structured interviews with specialists in media, international relations and cultural diplomacy conducted in 2022, together with four interviews with participants of the first wave conducted in 2026, in which informants were presented with their own earlier judgements and asked whether these still held. The media image of Azerbaijan reveals a persistent thematic imbalance: the conflict agenda crowds out the economic, cultural and humanitarian dimensions of bilateral relations. The experts register a gap between the potential of Russian–Azerbaijani ties and their media representation, point to a shortage of intermediary structures capable of converting institutional activity into media presence, and to the underused resource of digital platforms. The repeat interviews showed that over four years not one of the identified deficits had disappeared, but that the mechanism of their reproduction had changed: editorial selection has given way to algorithmic ranking, which is resistant to the instruments of editorial policy. The resulting structure of the problem field forms a system of categories for a subsequent quantitative content analysis.

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