POLITICAL IDENTITIES CONSTRUCTION IN UKRAINIAN AND FRENCH NEWS MEDIA

International audienceThis paper presents the main theoretical and analytical issues of my current PhD research namely “The media and the construction of identities: the case of contemporary Ukraine”. We investigate in what way the Ukrainian and French printed media are interpreting changes taking place in Ukraine since the independence and give the sense to identities in political and cultural terms. We are focusing on the news coverage of Ukrainian presidential elections of 2004, commonly known as “Orange Revolution”. Our data base consists in Ukrainian and French newspapers. The comparative approach has the merit of highlighting how national peculiarities (political and media cultures) affect the media representations and shape the construction of identities in the context of the intensifying processes of globalization that change the conditions for the nation state itself and nationally based political action. We use the qualitative discourse analysis of the text and the semiotic analysis of the newspaper text and photo. Based on facts and journalistic comments, operating different selections of events to cover with a double set of credibility and infotainment, the information discourse homogenizes the readers’ representations of the events and gives the symbolical consistence to their opinion. In this way, media construct social and political identities, found readers as political and social actors and give the structure to the culture they are belonging to