Zelensky's Image in Russian and Ukrainian News: Presidential Campaign 2019 in Ukraine

The work explores the portrayal of the sixth president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, in Russian and Ukrainian media sources during the pre-electoral campaign in 2019. The study used network analysis, n-grams’ generation, and LDA-based topic modeling. The study reveals that Russia’s media focused on Zelensky as a media personality, while Ukrainian sources paid attention to the portrayal of a novel popular politician. The target audience of the candidate’s campaign was the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine. Media in Ukraine’s native language were more inclined to mention elections, the role of the other candidate Petro Poroshenko and the nationalist mood, while defining Zelensky as just an ordinary candidate in an electoral race. The article is based on academic resources concerning the history of the development of political and media contexts in Ukraine, paying particular attention to agenda-setting, framing and priming techniques, and the personality of Volodymyr Zelensky.

Challenges and Opportunities for the Future of Media and Mass Communication Theory and Research: Positionality, Integrative Research, and Public Scholarship

In this essay I intend to tell a story of media studies and mass communication research as a field, based on the work of the late Denis McQuail – and that of editing the new edition of his seminal handbook McQuail’s Media and Mass Communication Theory (McQuail & Deuze, 2020). Using McQuail’s historical storytelling method, I specifically look at the challenge for the field in the context of a global pandemic alongside an infodemic, at a time when the whole world faces the consequences of recurrent lockdowns, social distancing measures, and institutional pressures to stay at home. Media studies and (mass) communication research, while having a distinct narrative, as a field has only just begun to articulate its relevance to society – we have only just started to tell our story. Using developments in understanding the self as a research tool, the implementation of integrative research designs, and calls for engaged and public scholarship, the paper outlines challenges and opportunities for what we can do with our field.

Infinite Interpretations? A Corpus-based Study for the Identification and Interpretation of Competing Frames in Parliament-representations in Hungary

Political communication highly depends on generic figurative frames such as Politics Is War, Object, Sport, Art and Politics Is Landscape. Regarding political art, it is suggested that artists use complex cognitive solutions (e.g. parallel issue-specific frames) in creative ways which are connected with one of the major generic frames. The study discusses parliament-representations (made between 2006 and 2015) which are not only attractive elements of the cityscape; thus, not literary representations of the building. Using the method of visual framing, the analyses (1) describe the artworks, (2) interpret the occurring symbols and metaphors determined contextually, and (3) reveal the ideological and power relations. Summing up, political artworks can be comprehended according to conventional mental schemas. However, artists usually create a minimum of two competing specifications of the general frames occurring at the same time, and let the viewer choose the one that fits better with their worldview.

‘Model Putin Forever’. A Critical Discourse Analysis on Vladimir Putin’s Portrayal in Czech Online News Media

This paper examines the Czech online news media representation of Vladimir Putin during three presidential elections (American of 2016, Czech and Russian of 2018). The portrayal of the Russian leader is examined using the methods of the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), mainly by the approach formulated by Teun van Dijk. The results showed a negatively biased portrayal of the president, Russian policy and the country itself, which corresponds with the historical-political context of the Czech-Russian relations, and which is in accordance with the Western media discourse. Applying the methods of global coherence revealed that the overarching theme of the coverage is Putin’s efforts to re-establish Russia as the global power and to restore the binary world as it was during the Cold war, while the methods of local coherence disclosed many implications, categorizations and the ubiquitous sarcasm and negativity in most of the texts.