Wandering politicians in the media space: the analysis of 470 thousand news

A survey by the Rating group showed that in quarantine, almost half of those questioned began to view the news more often. News of the pandemic is intertwined with political, as politicians often comment on the coronavirus, its spread and measures to fight it. So which politicians appeared in the news the most? Did all the media write about them equally? And how did the coronavirus pandemic affect the media space?

Main conclusions:

1. In February – June, Ukrainian online news sources mentioned President Volodymyr Zelensky the most, his name appeared in every tenth news item, 122,000 times in total. In the second place is Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal with 33,000 mentions. He is followed by Vitalii Klychko, whose name has been mentioned 31.5 thousand times.
2. Parts of news about politicians, with some exceptions, are fairly evenly distributed in all media. However, Ekonomichna Pravda writes more often about prime ministers than other media, and of all the news about Viktor Medvedchuk 36% are published by 112.ua and ZIK.
3. Among the most frequently mentioned politicians, the leaders in the share of negative news are Petro Poroshenko and Arsen Avakov: of all the news about them, 59% and 48% were negative, respectively. The proportion of negative and positive news about the president are almost equal, and most of the neutral news is about Dmytro Razumkov.

Who has been mentioned the most?

As in our study on the media terrain of presidential candidates, it turned out that the Ukrainian information field is dominated by news about the incumbent President: Volodymyr Zelensky is the leader in the number of mentions in all media outlets (Figure 1).

During the whole period the name of the president was mentioned in 10.6% of the news, a total of 122 thousand times, which is almost four times more than Denys Shmyhal, the second most mentioned politician (33 thousand).

Before the pandemic, Vladimir Zelensky was written about more often (there are 28,000 mentions in February in our database). But in March and April, Zelensky’s mentions became less (about 22,000 a month) as a new hot topic of the pandemic pushed other topics out of the media space. For the same reason, the number of mentions of Viktor Liashko quadrupled from February to March, and Maksym Stepanov was mentioned five times more from March to April. Vitalii Klychko also received more attention from the media because of the coronavirus, in particular thanks to media references to his press conference and publication on Telegram: from 2,000 mentions in February to 9,000 in April.

After Oleksiy Honcharuk lost his position of a prime minister, there were fewer and fewer mentions of him (from 7.5 thousand mentions in March to 500 in April). The number of mentions of the new Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal has also increased naturally: 12 times more mentions in March, than in February.

In April, we also observe the return of Mikheil Saakashvili to the Ukrainian media sight. 5.5 thousand mentions of him are connected to the active discussion of his possible appointment to the post of Vice Prime Minister. Arsen Avakov was mentioned twice as much in June as in the previous two months, which may be related to rallies and the draft resolution on his resignation.

The media’s favorite ones

Have any media been particularly favorable to certain politicians? For every media outlet, we collected a dozen of politicians on who these media wrote the most, the results are shown in the table and Graph 2.

The top 10 politicians in almost every online media are quite the same. However, there were some exceptions. Thus, Ekonomichna Pravda (EP) mentioned Prime Ministers Denys Shmyhal and Oleksiy Honcharuk relatively more, 18% and 15% respectively (while on the other websites there was an average of 4.5% and 9% of news about them). This can be explained by the narrower specialization of the EP, which often covers the work of the government.

There were also politicians who got into the top 10 of only one media. These are Vladyslav Krykliy (9% of EP news are about him compared to 2% in other media), Andriy Sadovyi (3% of mentions on Znaj.ua), Borys Filatov (2.5% of news on Obozrevatel), Vadym Prystaiko (2.2% of news on Segodnya), Geo Leros (2.7% of news on Censor.NET), Yuriy Boyko (3% of news on the Ukrainian News website).

Yulia Tymoshenko, Hennadiy Kernes and Davyd Arakhamia got to the Top Ten on two sites each: the first one on Znaj.ua and Apostrophe, the second — on Znaj.ua and Politeka, the third — on TSN and EP. Viktor Medvedchuk was in the Top 10 according to the mentions on four sites: ZIK, 112.ua, Znaj.ua and Politeka. The last two publications are related to each other and to the “Rukh za Reformy” party.

They love me/ they love me not: how do media cover politicians?

We calculated the general tone of mentions of politicians in the news and divided the news into negative, positive and neutral. The obtained distribution of news about politicians is shown in Figure 3. We assessed the emotional connotation on the basis of Sentiment Dictionary, read more about this in the section “How we’ve been counting”.

The news about Petro Poroshenko is the most emotional. The share of neutral news about him is the smallest, and the share of negative news is 59%. In each of the considered media, the number of negative news about the former president exceeds the number of positive and neutral ones, and on 22 out of 27 websites negative news is more than half. This is primarily due to the many criminal proceedings, suspicions and calls for the interrogation of the former president, that were actively covered in media. 4 media stand out against such a negative background, that published significantly more positive news about the fifth president: RBC-Ukraine, Obozrevatel, Censor.NET and Livyi Bereg. The share of positive news on these portals is from 31% to 39%, while for the rest the average is 14%.

The second highest share of negative news is for Arsen Avakov (48%).The minister was often mentioned in the news in connection with high-profile killings, shootings and protests. The largest share of negative news about Avakov was on the Radio Svoboda website (70% of all news about him). The average share of positive news about the minister is 15%, and the website with the highest positive result of 28% is Censor.NET.

The proportion of positive and negative news about Volodymyr Zelensky is almost equal: 30% and 32%, respectively. However, on 12 sites there are slightly more positive news about the president, than negative ones. We could not identify any media that would have a special fondness for Zelensky, but the most negative news about him was on the Politeka portal (49%).

Neutral news is written the most about Dmytro Razumkov — all 61%. Politeka also distinguished itself here, as on this website 40% of news about the speaker is negative, when an average share is 20%.

From frenemies to enemies: does the tone of news change over time?

We found some curious cases of the news tone changes for the 5 examined months, Figure 4.

Thus, the share of positive news about Volodymyr Zelensky in April increased by 11 percentage points (pp) compared to March, which can be attributed to the president’s statements about celebrating Easter, providing and receiving assistance in the fight against the pandemic. In June, the distribution of tones became the same as it was in February.

Instead, the share of negative news about Andriy Yermak increased by 20 pp in April, as back then the media has been actively writing about the scandal surrounding his brother, who was interviewing for positions in government agencies. It seems that in May the scandal was already forgotten, because the share of negative news decreased again.

Negative news about Petro Poroshenko increased by 15 pp in June, because the media wrote about the proceedings of the State Bureau of Investigations against him. Among the news about Denys Shmyhal the total share of neutral news is gradually decreasing, and the shares of positive and negative news remain approximately equal.

How we’ve been counting

As a mention we consider the presence of the politician’s name in the text. We consider a news item about a politician where his / her name has been mentioned at least twice to exclude cases of along the way mentions.

To assess the emotional coloring of news in Ukrainian and Russian languages, we used slightly modified Sentiment Dictionaries of Ukrainian (compiled by the lang-uk community) and Russian (developed by the “Word Map” project). The dictionaries contain words with a non-neutral sentiment: -2, -1, 1 or 2. The Russian dictionary contains 6700 words, and the Ukrainian — 2400.

The sentiment of a mention was calculated by searching in the corresponding sentence for emotionally colored words from the dictionary and summing up their tones. In addition, the tone of the word is influenced by negative and amplifying words in front of it. For example: the word “effective” has a sentiment of 1, while “inefficient” will have the opposite sentiment -1, and “very effective” will have a sentiment of 2.

As a result, we consider news to be negative if the total tone of all mentions in it is less than 0, positive — if it is more than 0, and neutral — if it is equal to 0.

The share of non-neutral words in most of the news portals in Ukrainian language is 3.5% – 4%, for the Russian-language news sites it is about 5%. Thus, Censor.NET, Livyi Bereg, Focus and Strana.ua are a bit more emotional due to the language, than other media. This difference has primarily came up due to the larger volume of the Russian Sentiment Dictionary. As expected, Ekonomichna Pravda turned out to be the least emotional media, with only 2.5% of non-neutral words in the news.