Moral framing in Ukraine war coverage

Abstract

To understand how coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is being packaged and presented to an international audience, this mixed methods study examines differences in moral framing of the war by English-language international broadcasters in Ukraine, Russia, the UK, and the US. A computational content analysis based on Moral Foundations Theory found the dominant moral domain and sentiment for each article (N = 935) during the first year of the war, and a qualitative frame analysis shows how framing in the coverage used the moral domains and sentiment to promote a ‘causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation’ (Entman, Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm, 1993: 52) for those involved in the conflict.