How does the Ukrainian media describe the most popular topics?

We have analyzed the news from 36 online media to see the theme they usually  write about and the “paints” they use. The most negative topics are emergencies and investigations, the media mostly writes about war, peace and politics in a negative way. Positive news is most common in show business, lifestyle and science/technology. Read a detailed review in the article below.

There was mostly (44%) negative news in Ukrainian media in October-November. We counted 28% of positive and neutral. Among five main categories there were politics, emergencies, coronavirus, economics and foreign policy. And negative news was the greater part of them (diagram1).

But among the less serious topics there were show business and culture, life and lifestyle. The positive news was as many as 71%. And there were 35% – 45% of positive publications in the categories of society, sports, science and technology. Such a distribution of “tone” in the media reminds somehow the usual television newscasts, where stories about politics, murders and accidents are made out with materials about animals and shopping.

Now we will take a closer look at five most popular topics to understand how they are covered in the media and what events attract the most media’s attention.

Main conclusions:

1.  Negative news prevailed in the Ukrainian media in October-November: there were 44% of them.
2.  Among 5 most popular categories there also was some news with negative tone: from 38% in the economy to 82% in emergencies.
3.  The main newsbreaks among the news of Ukrainian and foreign policy were quite situational, such as: elections, crises, armed conflicts. The main topics in other categories have been quite common, such as exchange rates, Covid-19 statistics or crimes and their investigations.
4. News categories, where negative and positive shares are the largest (emergencies and show business, respectively), are also characterized by a stronger emotional coloring of news.

Politics: popular and mostly negative

Ukrainian politics, that is usually one of the most popular topic in the media, has a commanding lead in October-November: 16% of all publications (or 45,000) are political news during the period under consideration. The majority (42%) of news about politics in the media is negative, 33% is neutral and another 25% is positive. 

The dominance of politics, of course, is related to the political event of 2020 – the local elections – the media wrote about which most often (25% of all political news). The shares of negative and positive news about the election are almost equal: 30% and 27%, respectively, and 43% of the neutral news.  

The next most popular political topic after the election was the Constitutional Court’s decision concerning a prevent corruption law. It was approved on October, 27, but as much as 10% of political news concerned the CCU in October, and their share rose to 14% in November. 69% of the news about this decision and the crisis it caused was negative, such as “the Constitutional Court has officially abolished criminal liability for lying in the declaration.” However, there was also 10% of positive news on that topic, such as the news “Visa-free travel to the EU for Ukraine.” Stefanishina has commented on the scandalous decision of the CCU.

4% of political news concerned Volodymyr Zelenskyi’s “poll” during the election. 44% of news on this topic was negative, and 18% – positive. The statements of the poll initiators were positive, such as the article “People’s opinion about “300 deputies» is important for the President as an argument for politicians – PO”, and the conclusions of other people were negative (for example, “Risk and threat to influence people’s opinion. The parliamentary parties of Verkhovna Rada criticized Zelenskyi’s “poll»”). 

Ukraine’s international policy was also covered in 4% of the news. Among them, as many as 52% was positive, another 29% – neutral and 19% – negative. There was positive news about international assistance and cooperation, for example, “The EU Head of the Representative stated that the European vector is the choice of the Ukrainian people, and quoted Stus” or “Ukraine and NATO have significantly enhanced cooperation in recent years – Vinnikov.” And the negative news was about the suspension of that cooperation, such as “the EU warned Ukraine for the second time because of attempts to destroy reforms in the Ministry of Education” or “German Ambassador: Judicial reform is the most important for Ukraine, but it has not been implemented yet”.  

Emergencies and investigations: 82% of negative news

The next most popular topic in the studied media were emergencies and investigations (13% or 35.3 thousand news in October-November). News with a negative emotional coloring significantly prevailed – 82% of them, and only 4% of positive news.  

Among the news about emergencies, the media usually writes about crimes, offenses and the reaction of law enforcement agencies (18% of news is in this category). Among them 91% is negative and only 2% is positive. Examples of negative news: “A man cut his friend with a knife and hid in the basement” or “Special forces gorgeously detained an armed recidivist with drugs at a gas filling station in Transcarpathia”. Among the few positives news was such as “Capital patrol rescued a 20-year-old girl trying to jump from the 25th floor” and “Lviv cops rescued a baby bitten by a dog.” 

Another 14% of news in this category is about the accident. And the next extraordinary news is related to the cases of officials and investigations of the SSU, NBI, NACB and SAP – 11% of news. This includes news such as “Head of Ivano-Frankivsk Regional Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was detained for bribery” or “Investigation of rape in Kagarlyk can be completed this month – NBI” (both negative). The distribution is similar in both topics above: 86% of negative, 3% of positive and 11% of neutral news. For example, there was positive news such as: “40 illegally privatized land plots worth of UAH 1 million will be returned to the state in Dnipropetrovsk region” or “Illegal construction of a military town was prevented in Odesa”.

Coronavirus: more negative in Ukraine than elsewhere

The third most numerous category of news was Covid-19 (12% or 34.8 thousand news). 54% of news about it was negative, 17% was positive and 29% was neutral.

We described in details the main “coronavirus” topics in a separate research. These were statistics of diseases, recoveries and deaths in October-November in Ukraine (22% of news about coronavirus), Covid-19 in the world (16%) and how the medical system of Ukraine copes with the pandemic (11%).

72% of negative news was about the Ukrainian statistics, while 65% of news was about the world statistics. There was only 3% and 7% of positive news on that topics, respectively. The news about the medical system had 40% of negative publications, 22% pof ositive and 37% of neutral.

One of the main topics was vaccines against Covid-19 in the fall, there was 10% of news about it. And at last, the emotional coloring of the news of this topic has been finally changed: 52% is positive, 33% is neutral and 15% is negative. 

Economy: balanced emotions

Mass media devoted 9% or 24,000 news to the economy. Among top five categories, the economy was the least negative: 38% of the news was negative, 33% was neutral and 29% was positive.

The most frequent news in this category was about the exchange rate – 11%. Publications about the rate were mostly neutral – 72%, another 17% of news was negative and 11% was positive. The negative news was, for example, the following: “Quarantine may suddenly change the dollar rate: analysts made a forecast”, and the positive was the following “The hryvna rate has  been strengthened on the interbank market”.

7% of economic news was about gas, tariffs and the heating season. This includes news with headlines such as “Ukraine has more than enough fuel reserves for winter – Buslavets” (positive) or “Naftogaz has warned about breaking up of the heating season start in half a hundred cities and villages” (negative). 42% of such news was negative, 17% – positive and 41% – neutral.

News about the world economy and economic forecasts amounted to another 7% of economic publications. 44% of publications have negative news, 27% have positive news and 29% have neutral news in that topic.

About 6.5% of publications were news about salaries, pensions and social protection. Neutral news was the most (39%) in that theme, and 30% of negative and 30% of positive news.

Foreign policy: negative prevails

The fifth most popular category was foreign policy in October-November, there was 8% or 22,000 news about it. The news here is distributed similarly to the Ukrainian politics by the emotional coloring: 48% of negative and 26% of positive and neutral. 

The main topic of foreign policy in mass media of this period was the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, the share of news about which was 20%. It is no surprise that there is predominant 75% of negative news, while 10% of positive news. Positive news about Nagorno-Karabakh was such articles as “Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed upon a ceasefire” and “Armenia is ready to discuss the bringing of Russian peacekeepers to Nagorno-Karabakh – Pashynian”, because the used algorithm, unfortunately, can not distinguish Russian peacekeepers from real peacekeepers. 

Ukrainian media paid a little bit less attention to the US presidential election, which was mentioned in 19% of world political news. This news turned up to be much more positive: 25% of negative, 31% of neutral, and 44% of positive.

The third top topic in foreign policy was the events in Belarus and the reaction of the international community to them. 10% of news was devoted to this topic, 56% of which was negative and 15% was positive. 

How negative is the news in the Ukrainian media?

We determined the emotional coloring of each news item numerically on the basis of positive/negative words in its text, which have a positive/negative meaning respectively (you may read more about it in the methodology). We consider news to be negative with a sentiment less than -1, positive – more than 1, and sentiment from the segment [-1, 1] is considered to be neutral.  

For example, the most negative publication during the study period was the following news “Air alarm and bloody battle: the latest data about the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan for Nagorno-Karabakh”: its tone was -216. And the most positive news became the following “The Phenomenon of Anna Varpakhovskaya. Actress who moved from Canada to Kyiv” with a sentiment of 178. However, these articles are very long (418 and 511 sentences respectively with a median of 16), so to take into account the size of the news, we divided the value of sentiment into the number of sentences. 

Після такої нормалізації за довжиною ми розбили значення сентименту новин на декілька інтервалів, щоб перевірити, наскільки емоційно забарвлені були новини в кожній із категорій (графіки 2а та 2б). Таким чином на графіку можемо порівняти частки новин з різною тональністю: від найнегативніших (“Смертельна ДТП на Хмельниччині: загинуло троє людей”) до слабко негативних (“Жовта” зона: як херсонці пережили перший день посилення карантину”) і від слабко позитивних (“Православну церкву України визнав впливовий предстоятель”) до найпозитивніших (“Є тільки одна Україна, яку ми повинні захищати”: Зеленський прийняв клятву в ліцеїстів”).

After such a normalization by the length, we divided the values ​​of news sentiment into several intervals to check how the news has been emotionally colored in each of the categories (Diagram 2a and 2b). Thus, we can compare the share of news with different tones on the diagram: from the most negative (“Fatal RTA in Khmelnytsky region: three people died”) to lightly negative (“Yellow” zone: how inhabitants of Kherson met with the first day of quarantine”) and from lightly positive (“The Orthodox Church of Ukraine was recognized by an influential primate”) to the most positive (“There is only one Ukraine we must defend”: Zelenskyi took an oath from lyceum students”).

We consider the section (-0.1, 0.1) to be neutral, because as a result of normalization mostly neutral (82%) and also insignificant parts of positive (9%) and negative (9%) news get there. In general, 91% of neutral news belong to this section.

The tone of economic news is distributed smoothly: to both sides from the center there is the “around neutral” tone, the more news become different, the lower their share is.There is a similar situation in political news, it is only with a slender lead of negative tone. 

The distribution of the news about foreign policy and coronavirus is more shifted towards negative sentiment, but the category of emergencies and investigations still differs the most. Here, the tone distribution center has shifted to very negative news (such as an article entitled “Three people died during a fire in a private house in Rivne region”).

And show business, culture and life/lifestyle  were the only categories where the center of tonality distribution was shifted to positive news.

Methodology

To determine the emotional coloring of Ukrainian-language and Russian-language news, we used the model described in the article “Universal, Unsupervised (Rule-Based), Uncovered Sentiment Analysis”.  It works on the basis of tonal dictionaries by searching for non-neutral words in a text, while also taking into account some syntactic rules. The model changes the sentiment of the sentence, or rather its parts, if there are objections (with  “not”, “no”, “neither”, “there is no”, etc.), opposition (“but”) or condition (“if”). In addition, sentiment is influenced by intensive/weakening words, such as: “very”, “barely”, “extremely”, which are collected in a separate dictionary. 

The described model is universal, and while working with different languages, only the rules and tonal dictionaries are being changed. We have used tonal dictionaries of Ukrainian and Russian languages, where negative words have -1, -2 grades, and positive words have 1 and 2, respectively. We have taken several sources as a basis for them: the Ukrainian dictionary from the lang-uk community, the Russian dictionary from the Words Map project and the WordNet-Affect thesaurus that had been translated into Ukrainian and Russian languages. 

Example: there are 2 non-neutral words with grades -1: “dangerous” and “problem” in the following sentence “The situation is very dangerous – Fursa about the main problems of the 2021 budget”. “Very” doubles the word’s tone, so the total tone of the sentence will be -3.

Saying that the news is negative, positive or neutral, we rely just on the words emotionally colored in the text. Therefore, the tone we have calculated first of all depends on the events that had been described in the news, while the perception may be varied by the reader.  

For the study, we formed a list of Ukrainian online media. We based on the open ratings of the Internet Associations of Ukraine, Gemius, Kantar, Similar web data, USAID-Internews researches, monitorings of the Institute of Mass Media and Detector Media.

We add media to the monitoring taking into account the following factors: the position of the media in the ratings and researches that have been mentioned above, the technical possibilities of data collection, estimation of the media relevance by the editorial board and by us as researchers.

For simplicity, by “news” we mean all the materials that came to our analysis (these can be articles and columns – depending on the structure of the media site).