Russia and Ukraine in the mirror of each other’s TV channels

Abstract

TV channels of each country usually report international news differently according to the citizen’s interests and foreign policy priorities of said country. Thus, foreign policy conflicts can be covered in multiple ways, this fact obviously does not contribute to their resolution. Research focuses on the coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation by the state-owned channels of these countries in 2014-2016. The samples include all news related to Ukraine on the Russian TV channel (Russia 1) and Russia on the Ukrainian channel (UA First) during seven weeks when the selected key events occurred. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were used. All news items were classified into four categories: political news, military news, economic news, social news. The considerable influence of national interest on media frames were shown. Russian and Ukrainian journalists were similarly interested in each other's events, even if the news of the moment was not directly related to the conflict. Both TV channels covered important global news, however they often selected different events which would be interesting for their national audience or related to their country's foreign policy. The both channels had been gradually losing interest in Russian-Ukrainian crisis up to 2015.

Keywords

• russian television
• ukrainian television
• ukrainian crisis
• framing
• news agenda
• information warfare