Propaganda Coverage of Russia's War in Ukraine

• In Event: The Evolution of the Putin Regime's Ideology

Abstract

The paper analyzes the frequency of mentioning in 32,000 Russian mass media (newspapers, magazines, news agencies, TV etc) of several groups of ideological concepts relevant to Putin's Russia. In the first of a series of papers, this quantitative sociolinguistic approach is applied to analysis of the frequency of mentioning concepts from four groups, namely aristocratic values (nobility, dignity, honor), liberal values (democracy, freedom, human rights, rule of law), hate speech (Ukrainian fascists and Nazis, banderovtsy) and various names of the Ukrainian war (war, conflict, special military operation). The paper demonstrates how the frequency of these concepts in the media changes over time and analyses the reasons for these changes. For example, the most popular of aristocratic values was honor, although the frequency of the word honor has been decreasing since August 2023. Nobility is mentioned in the media ten times less often than honor. In March 2022, as well as in March and August 2023 in all 429 Moscow newspapers and magazines nobility was cumulatively mentioned less than twice a day. On radio and television, nobility was mentioned even less frequently. Of the liberal-democratic values, the three main ones - freedom, democracy and human rights - show a clear trend of decreasing presence in the media. Freedom and democracy were mentioned about 40% less frequently in December 2023 than in March 2021, and the mentioning of human rights almost halved.

Author

• Alexander Smoljanski, Integrum World Wide