News Values and the Media Coverage of the Syrian Crisis: Informational Relevance and National Framing in Georgian Television News (2012-2016)

This study examines how the Syrian crisis was represented in Georgian television news through the lens of news values, informational relevance, and perceptions of geographical and political proximity. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Galtung and Ruge’s theory of news values, later refinements proposed by Montgomery, and scholarship on relevance and proximity, the study explores how global conflicts are translated into national news agendas within a small media system. The empirical analysis is based on expert assessments of the cumulative television coverage of the Syrian crisis by Georgia’s two leading broadcasters—the Georgian Public Broadcaster (GPB) and Rustavi 2—during the period 2012-2016. Using a mixed-methods design, the study combines qualitative in-depth interviews with political and media experts and a quantitative Thurstone-type scaling procedure. The findings demonstrate that experts perceived the Syrian crisis to have been predominantly reframed through domestic relevance—particularly via the figure of Tarkhan Batirashvili and the Pankisi Gorge—rather than through its geopolitical, historical, or humanitarian dimensions. According to the expert assessments, television coverage was fragmented, episodic, and largely deprived of broader analytical context, reflecting limited perceptions of the global relevance of the conflict within editorial decision-making. The study contributes to the literature on international news mediation by demonstrating how small media systems domesticate distant conflicts and how professional news judgments shape perceptions of informational relevance in foreign news coverage.