U.S. War Correspondents Tweeting Ukraine: A Case Study in Transnational Meta-Journalistic Discourse

Data Collection

The data sample used in this paper comes from a broader study in which we were examining U.S.-based journalists’ Twitter coverage of the 2022 war in Ukraine. In order to gather that first broad corpus of Tweets, we developed an automated extraction process in the open-source software Python 3.7 to extract tweets posted by 15 journalists from 24 February 2022 to 31 May 2022. We started our data collection on 24 February 2022, because hashtags related to the Russia-Ukraine war were trending on Twitter during this period. The three most popular hashtags on Twitter from February 24 to late April were #ukraine, #russia, and #standwithukraine. We used the principle of theoretical saturation when we concluded our data collection on 31 May 2022. From April 30 to May 31, journalists tweeted about the war less frequently, and 13 of the 15 journalists had already returned to the U.S. after their field reporting in Ukraine.

We collected the text of each journalist’s tweets during this time period, images attached to each tweet, and any links embedded in the tweet. From the larger data corpus (n = 5000), we manually selected tweets that specifically discussed the Russia-Ukraine war, which left us with 1500 tweets. For the purposes of this particular article, we then searched that smaller corpus of Tweets for instances in which the U.S.-based journalists overtly discussed their own labor, the labor of Russian journalists or the labor of Ukrainian journalists. We defined “Russian journalists” as those who were working for news organizations based in Russia or as Russian citizens who were working for organizations that were born in Russia but that had relocated to a nearby country to avoid government censorship. We defined “Ukrainian journalists” as Ukrainian citizens who were working for news organizations based in Ukraine or who were collaborating with correspondents visiting from other places.

It should be noted that at this stage of our analysis, we added one more journalist to our sample, and we gathered his Tweets manually. Initially, we couldn’t identify a journalist working for CBS News who was on the ground in Ukraine during the early months of the conflict and also sharing their experiences on Twitter. Yet, we later found that Charlie D’Agata had been on the ground (and Tweeting) in Ukraine during that time, and so we made sure to include each of his tweets that discussed journalistic labor in our analysis. Only 3 out of all of his Tweets posted during our time frame met the criteria. Our finalized sample size for our analysis of metajournalistic discourse was 162 tweets.

Because of the qualitative nature of critical discourse analysis, we did not try to gather the tweets of every single journalist covering Ukraine. Instead, our sample of journalists was purposive, allowing us to go into more depth in our analysis and account for the fact that we were looking for some very specific characteristics in the journalists whose discourses we planned to study: (1) The correspondents should have covered the war in Ukraine with “boots on the ground” at some point during the time period we selected, (2) the correspondents had to be working for one of the major news organizations based in the United States, and (3) the correspondents had demonstrated a range of nationalities, genders, and ethnicities.

This last characteristic was important to us because we wanted to avoid the tendency for communication scholarship to overemphasize the perspectives of White, Western men (Chakravartty et al. Citation2018). However, this was also a challenge, since the pool of U.S. war correspondents actively covering Ukraine was fairly homogenous. Two of the journalists we analyzed had Ukrainian heritage, although they had not grown up in Ukraine. One journalist was Jordanian, another was born in Egypt but grew up in the United States, and a third was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The rest of the journalists were White, and they had been born and raised in the U.S. or Britain. But they all worked for news outlets based in the United States. We also ended up with eleven journalists who identified as men and five as women. We could not find any examples of transgender and/or nonbinary war correspondents covering Ukraine for U.S. news outlets.

Despite the notoriety of the news organizations that we included in the study—ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times—many only had a few staff correspondents who were actually present in Ukraine during the time period we analyzed. Some of these correspondents (such as CBS’s Holly Williams) were not Twitter users. This left us with 2 correspondents from the Wall Street Journal, 2 from the Los Angeles Times, 2 from the New York Times, and 2 from the Washington Post. It also left us with 2 correspondents from Fox News, 2 from CNN, 2 from NBC/MSNCB, 1 from CBS, and 1 from ABC.

Data Analysis

Because we wanted to analyze metajournalistic discourse, we used critical discourse analysis (CDA) to interpret our data (Wodak and Meyer Citation2009). Journalism scholars have long relied on CDA to engage in “the strategic examination” of journalistic “speech or texts for embedded and inferred socio-political meanings” (Saldaña Citation2021, 300). Following the guidance of both recent and more traditional CDA scholars, our goal in this study was to look for instances in which the journalists were talking about war correspondence—be it their own, or someone else’s. We then sought to understand how these Tweets helped to build a metajournalistic discourse that situated U.S. war correspondence in relation to other war journalisms existing in the conflict zone, rather than thinking of U.S. journalism as something that is entirely separate from journalism professions in other parts of the world.

CDA is an interpretive process, one that is most interested in discussing the interconnections between discourse, power, and social injustice (Wodak and Meyer Citation2009). It does not accept the notion of the researchers’ objectivity, nor does it require intercoder reliability. This is because CDA researchers make no pretense of providing readers with “findings” that exist coherently and unproblematically outside the process of analysis. Rather than offering “findings,” we respond to our research questions by advancing what we hope is a persuasive (but inevitably debatable) argument about how we understand these Tweets contribute to transnational metajournalistic discourse.

U.S. Correspondents’ Discourse on Their Own Work

On 21 April 2022, LA Times correspondent Nabih Bulos shared a link to a more traditional story he had written about the war in Ukraine. Bulos was a Jordanian journalist who had long worked for the LA Times in Beirut before becoming a roving correspondent—a job which would take him to different warzones than those he had previously covered in the Levant. Bulos tweeted: “A visit to east #Ukraine's #Rubizhne, claimed to have been fully controlled yesterday by #Russian forces (not true, I was in the southern part and it's still not taken.) A sad story.” Although Bulos himself was not born and raised in the U.S., his Tweet invoked U.S. journalism’s dearly held notion of independence. In fact, Bulos’s Tweets largely exemplified a common phenomenon amongst journalists working for U.S. news companies—internalization of U.S. news values (Palmer Citation2019a).

First, the Tweet challenged a transnationally circulating narrative propagated by Russian authorities. In this sense, Bulos placed his own reporting—and his own presence at the scene—in direct opposition to both the Russian forces and the Russian media circulating their claims. On a related level, this Tweet suggested that Bulos himself was being more transparent than the Russians, by telling the truth of this “sad story” that situated Ukrainians as the unequivocal victims and Russians as both villains and liars. Bulos’s Tweet therefore contributed to a distinctly transnational type of metajournalistic discourse on the war coverage of Ukraine by presenting his Twitter followers with a portrayal of what counted as appropriate war journalism—journalism that challenged government lies and showed the “reality” of who was the victim and who was the perpetrator in this conflict. What is more, Bulos defined his own reporting—for a U.S. news organization—in direct opposition to the “lies” coming out of Russian media. In this sense, his portrayal of U.S. journalism was relational—it depended on an invocation of the Russian “Other” to gain its currency.

In a similar vein, ABC correspondent James Longman Tweeted: “I was in Moscow, where the government made it illegal to even say the word ‘war’ and calls the invasion ‘fake news.’ Now in Ukraine, where the war is sadly very real, as is the suffering of millions. I’m sure they wish it wasn't' (19 March 2022). As with Bulos’s Tweet, this Twitter post directly challenged the Russian government’s narrative, emphasizing Longman’s own authoritative presence in Ukraine as the proof of Russia’s lies. Conversely, Longman defined himself as an independent journalist, able to operate outside the confines of Russian censorship in order to share the “sadly very real” truth of Russian villainy with the world. Finally, through this representation of the events in Ukraine, Longman subtly centered his own independent war correspondence as the truest and most appropriate kind.

Unlike Bulos, Longman was a White, British journalist whose credentials before ABC included working with the BBC. But like Bulos, Longman’s Tweet drew upon a long-standing tendency in U.S.-based journalism: pitting U.S. news outlets‘ own version of the truth against the version of Russian officials. Longman also subtly implicated the Russian news media in this discourse, suggesting that—due to government censorship—Russian accounts of the conflict were likely coming from dupes of the propagandist system (Roudakova Citation2017). Russian journalists were a structuring absence in Bulos’s Tweet, the arbiters of the false information with which he contrasted his own reporting. Yet, Longman’s representation of his own reporting depended on the presence of the “lying” Other. This tendency to foreground the correspondents’ own “truer” more “independent” journalism—in direct relation to the purportedly different reporting in which Russian media engaged—surfaced regularly across our sample.

Alongside their tendency to Tweet about their own journalism, U.S.-based journalists also tweeted about reporting of other journalists working for U.S. news outlets. When they did this, they engaged in the already well-researched practice of first promoting their own organizations’ more traditional news content (Tandoc and Vos Citation2016). For example, New York Times correspondent Valerie Hopkins tweeted: “Listen to today's episode of the Daily about the journey that millions of Ukrainians are making West. @stavernise and I made the same trip and spoke to many people along the way. She has capturheir stories so powerfully” (7 March 2022).

In this Tweet, Hopkins shared an example of what she viewed as ideal conflict correspondence: that which “powerfully captures” the stories of the people being oppressed by war. Yet, Hopkins was sharing an example of another New York Times correspondent’s effort at showing an emotional (yet still independent) truth about the conflict in Ukraine. Rather than foregrounding the work of Ukrainian journalists or Russian journalists, Hopkins promoted her own world-renowned U.S.-based newspaper, intimating that the journalists working for the New York Times were producing the “truest” war journalism.

Though most of the U.S. correspondents’ tweets about their own work subtly or not so subtly suggested that their reportage was firmly located within the boundaries of the most acceptable form of war journalism, in two specific instances, these journalists instead deployed metajournalistic discourse to respond to other Twitter users’ criticisms of their work. The first incident occurred on 4 March 2022, when New York Times correspondent Michael Schwirtz tweeted a photo of armed Ukrainian soldiers. His Tweet said: “I’m in Mykolaev, a strategic port city in southern Ukraine that is preparing for imminent attack. Ukrainian artillery is firing at Russian positions all around the city. The one bridge out of town is rigged to blow and soldiers at the entrance are armed with anti-tank rockets.” About five hours later, Schwirtz replied to his own Tweet with the following: “A little context: I was given permission by the Ukrainian military and local government officials to take this picture and provide this info. The gentlemen in this picture have very big guns. If I had not received permission to photograph them, they likely would have used them.” Since some of the Twitter users who commented on his first Tweet had suggested that Schwirtz was wrongly sharing secret information on a public platform, Schwirtz responded by providing Twitter users with a behind-the-scenes look at his decision-making process.

It is important to note that Schwirtz—a White man born and raised in the U.S.—was a long-time staff journalist at the New York Times, and had, in 2020, won a Pulitzer Prize for his critical work on Russia. In this moment of public critique, therefore, Schwirtz could still rely on the surplus of cultural authority awarded him through these credentials. Perhaps this is why Schwirtz drew upon the more informal affordances of Twitter in this case, to assure other Twitter users—some journalistic actors and some non-journalistic—that he was continuing to operate within the boundaries of what counted as appropriate war correspondence. Although his Tweet also referenced the fact that he was sharing the digital space of Twitter with people who could directly contest his journalistic authority, Schwirtz ultimately drew upon Twitter’s rawer, more informal tone to construct a sense of transparency with his Twitter followers. Yet, with this Tweet, Schwirtz was also subtly reasserting his own authority as a U.S.-based journalist who had uninhibited access to the “truth” of the war. In Schwirtz’s discourse, the “truth” belonged to the Ukrainian soldiers with whom he was embedded.

The second instance in which a journalist in our sample found it necessary to respond to criticism of their work occurred on 13 April 2022. Washington Post correspondent Isabelle Khurshudyan tweeted: “Ukrainian officials claiming they have hit the Russian Naval cruiser, Moskva.” Only about 30 min later, she also posted: “And to everyone commenting that this needs more verification, I totally agree with you! (Sources for now are Odessa Gov. Maksym Marchenko and Ukrainian presidential adviser Arestovych.)” Since some of the Twitter users who commented on Khurshudyan’s post had suggested that she had not offered any proof in her first Tweet, she therefore responded by asserting her own knowledge of the need for independent verification. With this Tweet, she drew upon the informal affordances of Twitter to give the impression that she was responding directly to news audiences and answering their questions in real time. Yet, this Tweet ultimately recentered her own journalistic authority by subtly suggesting that her news audiences’ suggestions were redundant—she already knew that her Tweet needed more verification.

Like Schwirtz, Khurshudyan grew up in the U.S., but unlike Schwirtz, she had Armenian heritage and also had family in Odessa. Perhaps because she did not have the authority so often awarded to White men, she responded by agreeing with her critics, rather than joking with them. Yet, Khurshudyan still worked for an influential U.S. news organization. Thus, in her case as well as in Schwirtz’s, the response to criticism still operated in a way that reasserted her authority as a U.S. journalist. What is more, her Tweet pointed to U.S.-based journalists’ awareness of the myriad other actors—based in different parts of the world—who were attempting to influence the metajournalistic discourse on their coverage of the war in Ukraine. While it is useful to examine these two instances of war correspondents responding to criticisms of their reporting, it is also important to remember that these Tweets were outliers. Very few of the Tweets we analyzed engaged with any criticisms coming from the transnational array of journalistic and non-journalistic actors sharing Twitter during this time period.

U.S. Correspondents’ Discourse on Russian Journalists’ Work

Although many of the Tweets we analyzed were clearly defining U.S. journalism in opposition with Russian propaganda, these Tweets largely omitted Russian war correspondents from the discourse. When they talked about Russian journalists at all, U.S. war correspondents overwhelmingly discussed Russian reporters who were working outside the conflict zones in Ukraine. In these cases, U.S. war correspondents continued the tradition of representing Russian news reporters in binaristic terms, either as dupes of the propagandist system or as brave defectors (Roudakova Citation2017).

In their Tweets about Russian propaganda, the correspondents tellingly represented Russian media as a monolith, ignoring individual journalists and instead using vague phrases like “State TV.” For instance, on 22 March, Wall Street Journal correspondent Matthew Luxmoore tweeted: “Billing this war as a fight with nationalism apparently allows RT and other Russian outlets to trumpet the most wanton destruction. The goal—“denazification”—justifies the brutal means, by this logic.” Later, in April, ABC News correspondent James Longman tweeted that “Russian state TV has increasingly become a parody of itself” (26 April 2022), while CNN’s Matthew Chance simply tweeted a link to an industry trade story about his own critiques of Russian media (22 April 2022).

In each of these examples, U.S.-based war correspondents avoided any discussion of individual journalists, instead representing state-controlled media as a monolith with no transparency about the truth. This lack of transparency was subtly held in contrast to the transparency that U.S.-based journalists ostensibly embraced as they told the “real” story of the war. These journalists’ Tweets also represented Russian media as an entity that had no human face. The one exception was when Mathew Luxmoore ridiculed “TV host Olga Skabeyeva” for constantly “keeping [guest speakers] in line” (17 May 2022). Skabeyeva was low-hanging fruit for Luxmoore, given her long-standing reputation amongst both U.S. and British news organizations as the “combative host of Russia’s prime-time propaganda talk show” (Carroll Citation2019). She could easily be located outside the boundary of what counted as the most appropriate form of journalism. Yet, it did not necessarily follow that all journalists working for state-run news were simply “dupes” of the propagandist system (Roudakova Citation2017).

When the correspondents in our sample tweeted about Russian journalists defecting from their government’s narrative on the war, they instead used these journalists’ individual names, as well as emphasizing their bravery. One instance of this was when Luxmoore tweeted the following: “Disgusting attack this evening on Russian Nobel laureate Dmitry Muratov, editor of Novaya Gazeta. He says he was doused in red paint on a train to Samara by an assailant who shouted, ‘this is for our guys’ – presumably the soldiers his paper has been accused of ‘discrediting.’” (7 April 2022). Unlike in his Tweet about Olga Skabeyeva, here, Luxmoore foregrounded the journalistic credentials of the person he was discussing, noting he was a Nobel laureate and also the editor of a newspaper famous for challenging the Russian government. Luxmoore’s use of quotation marks around the accusations leveled against Muratov served to support Muratov’s stance against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It was therefore easier for Luxmoore to locate Muratov’s work within the boundaries of what counts as acceptable journalism—even if that journalism was not unfolding at the front lines.

U.S. correspondents also talked about their Russian colleagues when a reporter working for Moscow’s Channel One Russia TV stood behind a news anchor who was live on the air and held up a sign that accused the network of telling lies. The U.S. correspondents who mentioned this incident used the words “brave” or “courageous” to describe Marina Vladimirovna Ovsyannikova, as well as suggesting that she was now in serious danger of persecution from the Russian government. For instance, Valerie Hopkins tweeted: “She's at the police, per @pchikov, detained on charges of ‘discrediting the Russian armed forces.’ The video is viral, but one friend wrote me privately, ‘I hope she survives this.’” (14 March 2022).

While there is no doubt that Ovsyannikova’s public protest was incredibly brave, given the well-documented persecution of journalists within Russian borders, what interests us here is the way in which U.S. war correspondents wove her bravery into their metajournalistic discourse. Since Ovsyannikova’s actions matched the mainstream U.S. news industry’s long-standing notion of courageous Russian truth-telling—where “truth” can only occur if the Russian journalist defects from Moscow’s official narrative (Roudakova Citation2017)—the correspondents in our sample located Ovsyannikova’s journalism within the boundaries of what counts as acceptable journalistic practice. Although she was not a war correspondent working in the conflict zone, Ovsyannikova captured U.S. correspondents’ imaginations, not least because her version of the truth matched their own.

However, the journalists in our sample made no mention of the journalism practices of Russian correspondents working within the conflict zones in Ukraine, other than to remark that 4 journalists who had interviewed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy were not able to get their interview published within Russian borders. Outside this brief nod at the censorship these journalists faced, there was almost no acknowledgement that Russian journalists were present in the conflict zone at all. This was despite the fact that Oksana Baulina, a Russian journalist working for a Russian investigative outlet with editorial offices based in Latvia, was killed near Kyiv on 24 March 2022. Baulina was no “dupe” of the Russian state. Her news outlet said upon her death that it would continue to cover “such Russian war crimes as indiscriminate shelling of residential areas killing civilians and journalists” (“Unbelievable Horror,” 2022) even though the entire news organization had fled Russian borders. Yet, the journalists we analyzed never once discussed her work, or her death in the field. In this sense, their metajournalistic discourse located Russian war correspondents’ labor outside the boundaries of what counted as “appropriate” war correspondence, simply by ignoring it.

U.S. Correspondents’ Discourse on Ukrainian Journalists

As with the journalists working for Russian news organizations, it was uncommon for the correspondents in our sample to acknowledge the presence of Ukrainian journalists in the warzone. This only happened twice. First, it happened when Fox News cameraman Pierre Zakrevskiiy and his Ukrainian producer Oleksandra Kuvshynova were both killed outside Kyiv on 14 March 2022. After this incident most of the correspondents in our sample reflected on how horrific Zakrevskiiy’s death was and remarked that they would miss him.

Fewer Tweets mentioned Kuvshynova. One came from NBC correspondent Richard Engel, who posted about both Zakrevskiiy and Kuvshynova: “Like soldiers they gave up their lives for a cause, to shine a light in dark corners of our world at times of violent change” (15 March 2022). With these words, Engel suggested that both of these journalists were exemplars of the best and most transparent journalism, “shining a light in dark corners” and sacrificing their own safety for a cause: journalistic independence at all costs.

Kuvshynova’s Fox News colleague Trey Yingst also Tweeted about her death. He first Tweeted, on 15 March: “Sasha was killed alongside Pierre. She was talented, well-sourced and witty. She liked photography, poetry and music. We became fast friends over a shared love of coffee. She was 24 years old.” Because Kuvshynova had collaborated directly with Yingst, he took the time to Tweet about her talent and resourcefulness, as well as her humanity. In this sense, Yingst arguably located Kuvshynova’s labor within the boundaries of what counted as the most appropriate form of war-journalism. Yet, Yingst and Engel were the only two journalists who went this far; the few other correspondents who mentioned Kuvshynova simply listed her alongside their more extended discussions of Zakrevskiiy.

More compellingly, Yingst’s follow-up Tweet about Kuvshynova on March 16 pointed to another of the rare situations in which a U.S. war correspondent covering Ukraine found it necessary to respond to criticism—not of his own journalistic authority, this time, but of his news network’s. Responding to his perception that Fox News was being publicly criticized for underemphasizing Kuvshynova’s role in the network’s Ukraine coverage as well as failing to acknowledge her death on assignment, Yingst Tweeted: “There was a reason Fox News didn't initially mention Sasha. My bosses were on the phone with her parents multiple times before we could even confirm she had been killed. This wasn't a grand conspiracy to leave out Sasha, it was an effort to respect the wishes of her loved ones.”

Although an analysis of the comments on Yingst’s Tweets about Kuvshynova is outside the scope of our analysis, we are most interested in Yingst’s decision to respond to perceived criticism. His response points to the inevitable instability of journalistic authority within the broader transnational discourse that unfolds on social media sites like Twitter. Once again, a U.S.-based war correspondent drew upon journalists’ tendency to use Twitter as a space in which to directly address news audiences and give them a behind-the-scenes look at the journalistic process. In this case, however, Yingst used his 280 characters to jump right into an assertion of his network’s logic in underplaying Kuvshynova’s death. By reassuring his perceived critics that his “bosses” had simply been trying to confirm that Kuvshynova had died, Yingst subtly reasserted his own journalistic authority as well as that of his news network. Not only did his response suggest that Fox had been acting in precisely the right way; it also gave the impression that Yingst (and Fox News) was engaging in a meaningful way with local journalists, despite the massive lack of engagement that most of the correspondents in our sample displayed.

Other than the brief mention of Kuvshynova’s death alongside Zakrevskiiy’s, there was one other exception to the general omission of Ukrainian journalists from U.S. metajournalistic discourse: the Twitter discussion of the Associated Press team that on 21 March 2022, published a photo-essay called “20 Days in Mariupol: The Team That Documented the City’s Agony.” Five of the journalists whose Tweets we analyzed mentioned this AP story, at first glance appearing to simply promote a story produced by their U.S.-based colleagues. On closer investigation, however, we saw that the story was covered by two Ukrainian journalists who worked with the AP. Mstyslav Chernav and Evgeniy Maloletka had captured the photos that some of the Tweets in our sample lauded as the best kind of war correspondence—due to its emphasis on independence and transparency.

Yet, the Tweets in our sample significantly downplayed the fact that Ukrainian journalists had covered this story for the AP. For example, Washington Post correspondent Siobhan O’Grady’s tweeted: “Unbelievable bravery and heroism from the AP team in Mariupol and the many Ukrainians who helped them get the story out.” In this post, O’Grady celebrated the bravery and heroism of these journalists, but she simply referred to them as “the AP team.” More importantly, she added that “many Ukrainians” also “helped them get the story out,” in a way that suggested the “AP team” was not itself comprised of Ukrainian journalists. In this sense, O’Grady obscured the fact that journalists local to the warzone had contributed to a story that exemplified the best and “truest” war correspondence.