Professional role enactment amid information warfare: War correspondents tweeting on the Ukraine conflict

Abstract

War correspondents work within a networked media environment characterised not only by an explosion of information but also a wide range of actors producing competing narratives and viewpoints. This study examines the ways in which war correspondents enact their professional roles when tweeting from within a conflict zone. The analysis sheds light on the conditions of modern information warfare in the context of reporting from within the Ukraine conflict. It also identifies the emerging social media practices of war correspondents and the different role categories that journalists are adopting on Twitter.

The Ukraine conflict and the European media: A comparative study of newspapers in 13 European countries

“…Apart from major domestic events in Serbia during our study, limited resources for foreign coverage in the print sector of these countries – but also in Central-Eastern Europe – have to be taken into account. German or Scandinavian media, while lacking permanent staff in Kiev, could revert to permanent correspondents for Eastern Europe, mostly based in Moscow, to travel to Ukraine (Ojala et al, 2016; Pörzgen, 2014). In contrast, our consortiums’ partners from South-Eastern Europe reported that newsrooms rather sent home staff with supposedly less experience in foreign coverage and the region.…”

“…While 54 per cent of the articles were covering mainly politics, events ‘on the streets’ were the second most-frequent topic. Journalists’ sensitivity to their position in the ongoing ‘information warfare’ (Boyd-Barrett 2017a, 2017b; Dougherty, 2014) may be reflected in the small but substantial percentage of articles on the role of the media (see also Ojala et al, 2016).…”

“…Several studies on the coverage of the conflict in Ukraine have been published recently that analyse the media’s role in this ongoing conflict with tremendous humanitarian suffering. 1 Mejias and Vokuev (2017), Ojala et al (2016), Pantti (2016), Roman et al (2017) and Watanabe (2017) focus on the ‘information war’ between Ukraine, Russia and the United States as well as the ‘conflict propaganda’ of Anglo-Saxon mainstream media (Boyd-Barrett, 2017a, 2017b) and conclude that Anglo-Saxon, Russian and Ukrainian media in particular are heavily influenced by their national governments’ geopolitical interests. Studies that analyse the perception of the conflict in European countries are scarcer and have concentrated on only a few nations (for an overview, see Pantti, 2016).…”

“…Pörzgen (2014, 2016) has noted that a lack of Ukraine-based correspondents of German media has had a severe influence on the long-term coverage of rising tensions. Also, Swedish and Finnish newspapers have covered the events using the work of Moscow-based correspondents travelling to Ukraine (Ojala et al, 2016). Makhortykh and Sydorova (2017) analysed the visual framing of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine in different groups on the social media platform VKontake.…”

Examining determinants of adherence to peace journalism: Empathy, reporting efficacy, and perceived journalistic roles

“…These findings mirror those of Van Dalen et al (2012) who found that not only did role conceptions differ across countries, but journalists reporting different roles were also likely to engage in different framing practices. As such, role conceptions act as lenses through which journalists view the world (Hellmueller and Mellado, 2015) and influence treatment of specific issues, such as conflict (Ojala et al, 2016; Prager and Hameleers, 2018). Indeed, Ojala et al (2016) found that journalists embracing the advocacy role demonstrated greater involvement through the injection of opinion, debunking misinformation, and effort to influence public opinion while tweeting the Ukraine conflict.…”