American Research Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

In February 2022, a significant escalation of the Russia-Ukraine War occurred in the form of a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. This event was widely covered by all major national media outlets in the United States. In addition to television broadcasts and online live website feeds, media outlets also posted videos on YouTube analyzing the conflict. With these analyses came the proliferation of both peace journalism and war journalism, terms coined by Johan Galtung to separate language that promotes de-escalatory and humanizing approaches to the conflict, which is peace journalism, and language that promotes violence and further escalation, which is war journalism. In this study, a content analysis was performed on YouTube videos posted by the three American national media outlets with the most YouTube subscribers (CNN, Fox News, and ABC News). These videos were coded for instances of peace journalism and war journalism, as well as subcategories of both, with these instances being totaled for each media outlet being analyzed. It was determined that war journalism was used to a significant extent more often than peace journalism, though different media outlets don’t have a significant difference in usage of peace and war journalism compared to each other. These findings indicate that, while war journalism is more prevalent than peace journalism in American national media outlets, the media outlets themselves don’t have significant differences in reporting between each other