Framing Russia-Ukraine War in the Newspapers of Bangladesh: A Topic Modeling Approach

Chuton Deb Nath; Anirudha  Biswas; Nigar  Sultana; Sish Ahemmed Shozal

doi:10.48165/sajssh.2024.5215

Authors

Chuton Deb Nath Faculty, Mass Communication and Journalism Discipline, Social Science School, Khulna University
Anirudha Biswas Graduate Student, Mass Communication and Journalism Discipline, Social Science School, Khulna University
Nigar Sultana Graduate Student, Mass Communication and Journalism Discipline, Social Science School, Khulna University
Sish Ahemmed Shozal Graduate Student, Statistics Discipline, Khulna University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.48165/sajssh.2024.5215

Keywords:

Framing war, Russian-Ukraine War, Bangladeshi Newspapers, Topic Modeling

Abstract

Background: Media coverage consistently exerts a significant influence on the formation of
the public's opinion, especially framing the war. Media framing refers to the deliberate
selection and presentation of information in a manner that influences people's perception and
reaction to specific aspects of an issue. The major objective of this study was to investigate
how Bangladeshi Print media frame the Russa-Ukraine Conflict (RUC) during the conflict
period. Methods: The study comprised of scrapped data from the online version of two
newspapers the Daily Star (n=1135) and New Age (n=728) news items related to the RussaUkraine conflict from 24 February 2022 to 24 February 2023. The news stories were scraped
utilizing Python’s web scraping package Beautiful Soup. The data is analyzed adopting the
Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling technique to determine the dominant
framings like top keywords, top key phrases, and the most highlighted topic of the RussaUkraine war. Results: The frequency analysis of the Daily Star showed Ukraine (n=7,112)
and Russia (n=5,884) being the most frequently used words, similarly New Age depicted
Ukraine (n=4,901) and Russia (n=3,655) as both newspaper’s top two mentioned words:
Ukraine and Russia, were the same. The ‘United States’ was the top and second most used
key phrase in New Age and The Daily Star, correspondingly. Surprisingly, Daily Star
mentioned ‘United States’ (n=487) and ‘Joe Biden’ (n=211) in a notable amount though the
United States was not a direct part of the conflict. The topic analysis showed that the topic –
‘Military confrontations between Russia-Ukraine’ (frequency =513) and the topic- ‘Russia
and Ukraine’s military clashes’ (frequency= 421) had the utmost priority in the coverage of
the Daily Star and the New Age, respectively. Conclusion: It was evident from our findings
that Unites States, Joe Biden, western, sanctions, European Union, security council, Black
Sea etc. topics were got much attention in compared with the sufferings of the victims, price
hike, energy crisis etc. topics.

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