The Representation of the Ukrainian Crisis in News: Frame Analysis with Topic Modeling

Student: Pashakhin Sergey

Faculty: Saint-Petersburg School of Social Sciences

Educational Programme: Modern Social Analysis (Master)

Final Grade: 10

Year of Graduation: 2017

News framing shapes peoples’ beliefs and opinions, voting behaviour and policy-making processes. Struggle for news frames is an important part of modern international relations. Comparative studies of 2013—2014 Ukrainian crisis media representation could not be found. Along with that there’s a need for a new method capable to handle large news item collections. The goal of the study was to discover how conflicting sides (Ukraine and Russia) could construct news discourse on the case of 2013—2014 Ukrainian crisis and could topic modelling be used for the purpose. We choose Channel One from Russian side and Channel Five from Ukrainian because of their proximity to power. We downloaded news items from their websites for the period 1 September 2013—1 September 2014 which resulted in a collection of 50 000 news items. We found that topic modelling is a valid method and we show its advantages and limitations on a collection of 50 000 news items. We show how news framing transforms with escalation of the south-east conflict. First, channels agendas start to diverge. Then, we show how Russian channel used agenda and framing to construct news discourse around stable vision of Ukrainian events. We show how Ukrainian channel first becomes loyal to government and then becomes an instrument of struggle with Russia.

Full text (added May 25, 2017)

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