A Product and a Process: Reporting the EU in Ukraine

A dual nature of international communication prescribes a nuanced attention to the study of news media communications of international actors as a process and a product. Assuming that “the media can alter political outcomes by influencing the public’s attention to major issues of the day, leading citizens to learn new information, changing attitudes about objects in the political world, and mobilizing or demobilising political action” (Valentino and Nardis 2013, 563), our paper explores framing of the EU in Ukraine’s leading press (eight newspapers observed in 2016). Our study of the media content – ‘the product’ dimension – is positioned against the contexts of how and why media texts about the EU are produced (traced in the series of interviews with Ukrainian newsmakers). Typologies of media systems “describe typical patterns of how journalism cultures, media policy, media markets, and media use are connected in a given society” (Brüggemann et al. 2014, 1038). Hallin and Mancini (2004) argued three models of media systems: the Polarized Pluralist Model (Southern Europe), the Democratic Corporatist Model (Northern Europe), and the Liberal Model (the North Atlantic). Our paper follows a critical re-conceptualisations of this model proposed by Jakubowicz (2007) and Blum (2005) who singled out a set of unique features of media practices in Eastern Europe: the former argued that an Eastern European/post-communist model needs to be added to the three models first proposed, and the latter offered a ‘Shock model’ category. Informed by the conceptual debate on global media systems, we contribute to better understanding of Ukraine’s information flows about the EU.