Monitoring of the daily printed newspapers of the Western Balkans for the coverage of the events in the Russia-Ukraine war with special emphasis on their cover page

Abstract

The coverage of the war in Ukraine has become an important aspect in understanding global politics and the new world order. Given the heightened interest in coverage among regions directly affected by this war, this paper offers a regional overview of events in the Russia-Ukraine war over a four-month period. The paper examines daily printed newspapers in the Western Balkans, providing a comprehensive analysis of the geographic landscape. The data was collected from equivalent functional media through a strict and systematic selection of news related to the war in Ukraine. Media sources were selected using the snowball sampling method, beginning with Albanian newspapers and expanding to include all the Western Balkans countries. The study analyzed cover page headlines from two daily print newspapers in five Western Balkans countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia. In these newspapers, the headlines were analyzed in terms of the space they occupied, their objectivity, subjectivity, and bias toward one of the parties in war. The main findings of this paper reveal that a significant number of news headlines are presented in a sensational manner. In terms of objectivity and subjectivity, five newspapers published objective headlines while the other five published subjective ones. However, the percentage of objectivity and subjectivity varies from country to country and from newspaper to newspaper. As for bias, the majority of newspapers lean towards Ukraine. Our findings are comparable and can be proven at any time.