Abstract
The following study analysed online articles in German media discussing protests in Ukraine in 2014 and Belarussian protests in 2020. A mixed-methods approach of combining qualitative and quantitative content analyses was used to examine frames and frame sources utilised in the articles. There were 489 articles used for the analysis. The study also examined statistically significant differences between the frequency of frames by country. A frame indicated in each story was coded as a variable (“human impact”, “powerlessness”, “moral values”, and “conflict”). The human impact frame was more common in articles regarding Belarus than in articles regarding Ukraine. The moral values frame was the least common frame in articles regarding both Ukraine and Belarus. The powerlessness frame was the most prominent for both countries. The most significant difference between the two countries was indicated regarding conflict frame utilisation. The statistical analysis shows that there is a statistically significant difference of frames covered by German media. The statistically significant difference of powerlessness frame was: 67,49% (Ukraine) and 76,74% (Belarus); in moral values frame: 2,48% (Ukraine) and 6,59% (Belarus); in the conflict frame: 24,46% (Ukraine) and 6,59% (Belarus); in human impact frame: 5,57% (Ukraine) and 10,08% (Belarus). Finally, the utilised sources by frame were indicated. Sources utilised for the powerlessness frame were international officials and local officials (in Ukraine and Belarus). Sources utilised for the human impact frame were citizens (in both Ukraine and Belarus) and oppositional politicians (Belarus only). Sources utilised for conflict frame: oppositional politicians (Ukraine only), international officials, local officials. Sources utilised for moral values frame were local celebrities, intellectual elite (Ukraine) and oppositional politicians (Belarus). Findings show that media in Germany relied mostly on politicians and international officials, while the perspective of ordinary citizens appeared to be less prominent.
Highlights
The radical Ukrainian group Right Sector. (2015, September 29)
The researcher first reports on the most prominent frames using a coding scheme proposed by Neuman, Just and Crigler (RQ1), the statistically significant differences of frames indicated during online article analysis will be represented (RQ2)
The results show that sources used while utilising the most frequent powerlessness frame were international and local officials in both countries
Summary
The following study analysed online articles in German media discussing protests in Ukraine in 2014 and Belarussian protests in 2020. The problematic aspect of this notion might be, that if reporters tend only to select government officials, widely known politicians and other prominent public figures, they tend to appear more credible while at the same time perpetuating a relatively one-sided and possibly biased insight on the topic When it comes to international journalism, “press systems and political systems both vary across regions and countries, as does the social status of journalists, so what might appear to a Western perspective as co-optation, just as likely reflects the pragmatics of journalistic and, more broadly, cultural realities” [3, p. Each article was analysed to 1) common themes in news coverage of protests in Belarus and Ukraine; 2) sources of direct and paraphrased quotations; 3) dominant frames used to explain events and related political discussion. The inter-coder reliability was 0,89 using Cohen kappa
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