Uptake of Mainstream News on the Ukraine War in German Querdenken Telegram Communities

The second presenter in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference is Svenja Boberg. She begins by noting that crisis reporting seems to be the new normal in journalistic reporting of the current permacrisis, from COVID-19 to the Ukraine war and beyond. But journalism is not necessarily prepared for this, and the quality of its reporting especially on war crimes and other critical matters is sometimes problematic and insufficiently thought-through.

Journalistic crisis reporting depends on the time available for preparations, and the routines in reporting that journalists can build on. From the initial breaking news situation, more context becomes available, and perspectives for reporting broaden; crisis journalism often focusses on political elites, less on context, changes narratives and frames over time, draws on ritual and symbolic functions, and sometimes engages in a kind of ‘pseudojournalism’ in uncertain news environments.

This project examined Telegram as a channel for inward counterpublic communication, which enables the formation of counterpublic identities and was used for such purposes especially during COVID-19 and the Ukraine war (with some groups transitioning from one to the other in their interests), and examined how such groups drew on mainstream media reporting. It drew on CrowdTangle to identify mainstream news articles related to Ukraine, and gathered Telegram messages related to the war from some 100 Telegram channels run by sympathisers of the alt-right Querdenken movement in Germany. It matched these two datasets to see how these news links appeared in Querdenken messages.

This found a strong focus of war reporting articles on Putin’s agenda, especially early on; daily updates, at the start of the war; and war crimes, in the early months of the war. Overall volume declines, and war crime reporting does so particularly, over time, and this may indicate some issue fatigue. Domestic debates focussed especially on refugee management early on, shifted to the Chancellor’s crisis management, and also addressed the subsequent energy crisis. Foreign debates focussed especially on NATO; and soft news were overwhelmingly about expressions of solidarity. Emotionalised and exaggerated opinion pieces and attention-grabbing reporting were especially prominent.