Corpus-based comparative analysis of discourses in the Eastern and Western media coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian War

Abstract

Abstract. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine resulted in an unprecedented volume of global media reporting with news outlets becoming key actors in mediating public knowledge of the war, framing interpretations of the conflict, and constructing ideological meanings through linguistic choices. This study offers a corpus-based comparative investigation of how Eastern and Western English-language media have represented the Russian-Ukrainian war at the lexical level. By examining prevalent textual features, the study elucidated the discursive constructions of war and implicit ideological orientations embedded in news reporting. Conceptually, the research aligns with the theoretical underpinnings of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which emphasizes the role of language in shaping, legitimizing, and contesting social realities. Previous scholarship has demonstrated that discourse contributes to the affirmation of power hierarchies, the reproduction of propaganda, and the manipulation of public opinion (Blommaert & Bulcaen, 2000; McLuhan, 2005). Studies specifically examining the war discourse in the RussianUkrainian context have revealed the use of lexical strategies to distort the nature of aggression, justify violence, and construct ideological allegiances (Shevchenko et al., 2022; Ilin & Nihmatova, 2023; Salihoglu & Karatepe, 2023). Building on this body of work, the present analysis employs corpus methods to uncover patterns across large text samples, which is essential to mitigate intuitive bias of discourse-oriented findings. Two specialized corpora were compiled for the purpose of this study using the LexisNexis database. The Eastern Corpus (EC) consists of 3000 news excerpts totaling 475,506 tokens sourced from Asia News Monitor, South China Morning Post, and Hindustan Times. These outlets represent major Eastern geopolitical actors, providing insights into news narratives shaped outside the EuroAtlantic sphere. The Western Corpus (WC) comprises 3000 excerpts (531,973 tokens) drawn from The Guardian, the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, and The New York Times. All texts in both corpora met the inclusion criterion of containing the explicit reference war in Ukraine either in the headline or body of the article (Lőrincz, 2023).