Fact-checking and journalists professional standards usually are considered to be the best fail-safe against manipulations in media. However, we found that newsmakers are able to manipulate even the audience of so-called ‘high-quality media’ who practice all mentioned approaches. To prove this we have refined the concept of ‘pseudo-event’, introduced by D.J. Boorstin, by defining the term ‘fake newsworthy event’ as an event created by newsmakers, that is high-profile and attractive for media, but the only or particular aim of these actions is an agenda-setting, and this aim is not obvious from the origin of the action. Namely, the member of parliament may file some bill realizing that it cannot be adopted and trying just to shape the public opinion. Or some person may claim against a celebrity or businessman having no chance to win at trial. On the example of Ukrainian ‘high-quality media’ we showed that journalists usually do not take into account whether some topics are launched just for manipulating agenda-setting. To prove that we gathered the data about publications focused on such topics in Ukrainian ‘high-quality media’, we provided their discourse analysis, and compared the result with experts’ evaluations of ‘media quality’ and ‘artificiality rate’ of the topic. We have not found correlations between ‘artificiality’ of the topic and the number of publications. Recommendations were elaborated for the media workers if they want to avoid this type of manipulation.

In this article, we expand the methodological approach to strategic narrative analysis based on the case of the contemporary Russian–Ukrainian war. Namely, we introduce the concept of a “connective strategic narrative.” Such a narrative is not intentionally constructed by elites but created by the “affective public” on social media—emotionally tied social media users, according to Papacharissi’s definition. We argue that the patriotic Ukrainian narrative about the war evolved in social media can be considered a connective strategic narrative that is more comprehensive than the “normal” strategic narrative shaped by authorities, while the pro-Russian social media war narrative is merely a reflection of the official strategic narrative. Based on social media data, we conducted a structural narrative analysis of both strategic narratives used in the ongoing war in Ukraine and deployed in the Ukrainian information space: the offensive pro-Russian narrative and the defensive Ukrainian narrative. The pattern for such analysis is based on Korostelina’s framework for national narrative analysis. Our analysis emphasizes the key differences between these narratives and shows that the Russian one has crucial disadvantages that prevent it from successfully engaging the Ukrainian people. Instead, as it was developed with the significant participation of ordinary citizens, the Ukrainian strategic narrative had the total advantage in the struggle for the attention of Ukrainians at the beginning of the full-scale invasion.

Communication practitioners often seek fast quantitative and qualitative analysis of the information campaign outcomes in the media space. Such analysis is required by PR departments of commercial brands, by political technologists, and by experts in information wars and ideology. A new approach for the analysis of information campaign outcomes is introduced in this paper. Using PR messages as a category for analysis of media coverage of information campaigns provides a framework for credible efficiency evaluation, as well as for the deep analysis of the factors contributing to achievements or failures. This method allows the campaign organizers to understand what message it is better to disseminate in the media. In other words, through the messages of what kind the opinion of the campaign initiator or their opponents is conveyed to the media audience more effectively. We consider a message to be a judgment in which an object or predicate relates to the substance of the information campaign. Using it as a category for analysis and several types of the message as subcategories of analysis allows us to combine qualitative and quantitative approaches and, at the same time, avoid many restrictions of content analysis, discourse analysis, and narrative analysis. We show how the method works on the example of the failed information campaign that promoted a lobbyist and populist bill in the Ukrainian parliament. We showed that only our method could explain the reasons for its failure and provide the best way to improve the communication.

Media posts spread throughout social networks due to their ability to call the readers to actions which is the sign of their influence. These actions can be considered both as social and communicative. Therefore, they can be studied in relation with other social actions taken by the same users offline: participation in mass protests, purchase of goods, downloading mobile applications, etc.The research has shown that not every share means the readiness for such offline actions. Most often this readiness is observed if media posts on a particular topic are shared through goal-rational actions and at the same time have a high influence on the audience. This influence is assessed by the author’s methodology of determining the interactive potential.The research has also found that while the news is spread among the politically active Ukrainians, the proportion of different types of shares varies depending on the indicator of publication influence on the audience. For publications with high influence indicator, goal-rational and value-based shares are the most typical and if the indicator is low, the affective spreading occurs.