Digital and mass media coverage of Russia's invasion of Ukraine compared: Uniformity within countries and diversity between countries

Abstract

The article compares digital and mass media coverage of the first two years and five months of the Russo-Ukrainian War, from February 2022 to July 2024. The war is the first fully digital war as far as its informational dimension is concerned. The study aims to determine which type of digital war, participative or arrested, better describes the situation in the two belligerents. Particular attention is paid to Telegram, a messenger, because of its importance in covering the war. The analysis is comparative in several ways. In addition to comparing mass digital and mass media, it includes international comparisons of five countries: the two belligerents, the USA, the UK, and France. Two periods of the war are also compared. It is shown that similarities in how digital and mass media covered the war exceeded divergent patterns within countries, which indicates that uniformity prevailed over diversity in war coverage at the national level. National clusters of sources of political, media, and mass discourses emerged in comparisons between countries. An original design of computer-assisted content analysis was used to process a unique corpus of political, media, and mass discourses about the war. The corpus contained more than 273 million words in four languages: Ukrainian, Russian, English, and French.