Commonality in Agendas of Ukrainian Television Channels

Abstract

Relevance of the study. The problem of thematic misbalance in news is indisputable nowadays. Newsmakers are obliged to meet not only standard news criteria, but also a media audience expectations regarding the structuring of its interests. The main objectives of the study were to detect the coherence in agendas of the leading Ukrainian TV channels as well as to trace their conformity with the public agenda. Methodology. Content-analysis method was used to identify those topics in news stories (N=1186) that got the most attention on the studied channels. Calculating the coherence and rank correlation coefficients made it possible to trace the commonality in thematic priorities among channels themselves and between channels and their audience. Data triangulation method made it possible to select the points of public agenda from the survey by the -Democratic Initiatives‖ Foundation. Results. The studied channels tend to reflect Ukrainian and world events in identical thematic proportions: coherence coefficient of devotion attention to the topics was fixed at a high level: W = 0.87 (p≤0.005). There is a tendency for emphasizing particular range of issues (bureaucrats, corruption, crime, material support) and missing from attention of some others (decentralization, environmental issues). Only a half of the topics (49%) was identified as important to the public's view, other issues didn't correspond to public agenda, therefore, the manifestation of the agendasetting effect was fixed at a weak level (r = 0.2 at p> 0.1). The probable cause of the low correlation between media and public agendas may be the deterioration of living standards in Ukraine due to current state of war conflict. Conclusions. In terms of thematic priorities, leading television channels can be characterized by a high degree of consistency, while the television agenda is only half-compliant with public agenda, so that its conformity with the public agenda was fixed at a weak level.