Abstract Reporting on the attack on Ukraine in Germany
As the communications landscape continues to change, social media has established itself as a source of journalistic reporting and has become an important player in the opinion-forming process. Recognised broadcast and print media have also extended their content to these platforms. This raises questions about differences in reporting and the political spectrum.
In the "Digital Humanities" seminar at the University of Regensburg in the winter semester 2022/2023, this topic was explored in the context of the war in Ukraine. The project was entitled: "The relevance of the Ukraine war in a national context". The aim was to determine the proportion of war reporting and the most relevant topics in relation to the war in Ukraine in the contributions of selected media.
The Instagram posts of the news portals, Bild, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Tagesschau in the period from 1 January 2022 up to and including 31 December 2022 were analysed in more detail. A keyword search was used to look for recurring terms such as "Ukraine", "Putin", "weapons" etc. within the data collection. This resulted in a list of the absolute frequencies of the keywords for each month of 2022, which provided an indication of the proportion of war reporting and the most relevant topics.
The Tagesschau provided the most posts and the highest proportion of war-related posts. The keywords "Russia" and "Ukraine" were mentioned in almost equal measure. Arms deliveries were central to reporting, which, in contrast to the other two media, was particularly evident in the first quarter. Bild and Süddeutsche Zeitung had a similar number of posts in the period in question, but Bild's coverage of the war was consistently stronger. It was also noticeable that Bild had the strongest increase in war-related reports of all three media from August onwards. Süddeutsche Zeitung, on the other hand, consistently had the fewest reports on the war. There were also thematic differences here. From quarter one to quarter three, Ukraine was mentioned more than Russia. Weapons were also covered less.
Abstract Reporting on the attack on Ukraine International
This thesis analyses the coverage of the Ukraine conflict on Instagram by various international news channels. The question is whether there are differences in reporting between the news channels before and after the start of the war and whether these differences are geographically determined.
The analysis is based on a dataset of Instagram posts from seven news channels from different parts of the world. The posts are divided into two time periods, before and after the start of the war in February 2022, and it is found that coverage of the conflict is present in the news media and that there are differences in coverage before and after the start of the war.
The results show that fewer war-related words were used before the start of the war, while after the start of the war there was increased coverage of the conflict. This is reflected in the use of terms such as "Ukraine", "Russia" and "war", which appear more frequently after the start of the war. It is also found that geographical proximity to the conflict area could have an influence on coverage, as news channels from countries in close proximity to Ukraine report more on the conflict.
The paper highlights the importance of computational methods in media analysis and how they can help to analyse a larger amount of data from different countries. Nevertheless, further research is recommended to get a more comprehensive picture of global coverage of wars and possibly reflect the opinions of society as a whole. It may also be useful to conduct sentiment analyses to determine how coverage before and after the start of the war influenced public sentiment.
