During the 2016 campaign, Russian media described Trump positively 326 times out of 347, and the authors conclude the pattern meets every mark of propaganda

In April 2016 a YouGov poll across the G20 found Russia was the only country whose public preferred Trump for U.S. president over his Democratic rival, by 21 points, while in 15 other countries she led by more than 21. This study proposes that the popularity did not arise on its own but followed directly from how Russian media built Trump's image for audiences at home.

Quantitative content analysis (counting text units and coding their tone) followed by discourse analysis that ties the texts to their social and political setting. The sample is 91 texts from state-owned or government-aligned television, newspapers and news sites between 1 March and 31 July 2016, selected when Trump's name appeared in the headline or subheading. The unit of analysis is the text about Trump, with his rival and the Russian authorities as surrounding actors. The authors translated the Russian texts themselves.

• Almost entirely positive tone. Of 347 units describing Trump, 326 (93.95%) were positive and 21 negative; his quotes about Russia 173 to 2; quotes on Russian foreign policy 62 to 0; his relationship with the Russian leader 71 to 3; his criticism of the sitting U.S. administration 23 to 0.
• The labels sound negative in English but not in Russian. “Scandalous”, “shocking”, “provocative” and “eccentric” dominate, yet the authors note that in the Russian context they read as “not an ordinary person, and not a stupid one”, alongside honest, sincere, brave and direct. Verbs are almost always active: he criticises more often than he is criticised, he speaks rather than is spoken about.
• He is cast as the only U.S. politician friendly to Russia, who would restore relations, lift sanctions, cooperate on Syria and stay out of Ukraine. Outlets quoted his questioning of NATO's collective-defence principle and the removal of pro-Ukraine language from his party platform.
• Russia is inflated into the centre of the U.S. election. Outlets suggested the Russian leader's support won Trump votes, and that “never before has the name of the Russian president been mentioned so often in the presidential debates”.
• An anti-establishment tone. Trump is narrated as an unexpected ally of an agenda the outlets already held: blaming the U.S. political establishment for Russia's misfortunes.
• The key technique is praise by quotation rather than by the outlet's own evaluation. Most of the positive image arrives as Trump's quoted words and as the conditional “he can”, which can be neither proved nor refuted.
• The authors conclude that the discourse has every typological feature of propaganda in their framework: ideological bias, tendentious positioning of actors, fixed images of friends and enemies, and a bright future set against a dark present and past.

For readers of foreign news the study offers a three-point check: who is always the actor and who is acted upon; whether the narrating country has been moved to the centre of another country's story; and whether praise arrives as quotation, which carries none of the accountability of an evaluative sentence. The paper is also the baseline for three later studies by the same team that follow the same image through to the 2024 election.