Salient topics in the local news of the digital media and societal security: A cross-national comparative study

The paper presents a cross-national comparative study of the content of the media agenda in Russia, Tajikistan, Latvia, Sweden, and Bangladesh. The media agenda is reconstructed through journalistic materials as components of the national digital media systems. Based on social-cultural and semantic approaches, concepts of salience and diversity, the authors examined the national media content that was released simultaneously and reproduced the local (national) agenda. The study identified significant themes, nominal and thematic diversity across countries. At the empirical stage of the study, the corpus manager Sketch Engine was used to apply the corpus linguistics techniques. The empirical base consisted of more than 300,000 words. Lexical-statistical, contextual, and thematic analyses allowed the authors to group the “strongest” key words and phrases into lexical-semantic groups, identify the most important thematic areas and specific topics and analyze the nominal and thematic inter-country diversity in terms of societal security. The distinctive topics seen in the media reproduce issues that are unique to each country and associated with its history, culture, and social-political situation. These topics preserve the structural stability of journalism and demonstrate the cultural diversity of discourse: the countries of the European Union (Latvia and Sweden) were in the summer holidays, Bangladesh was going through a revolution, Russia was engaged in the SMO and Tajikistan was facing the perennial economic development issues. Thus, national culture and identity were colored by national political priorities in news production.