A story about the war, a story about Poland. The dynamics of the debate on the war in Ukraine and its role in the Polish political dispute

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the dynamics, structure, thematic scope of reporting on the war. The subject of the media narratives to which I refer is Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine. The starting point was a colloquial observation about changes in the way war events are reported and interpreted in Poland, a neighboring country to the state at war – Ukraine. Although they are an inevitable consequence of the duration of an extended armed conflict, it seems interesting to note the functions that, for the purposes of internal and external politics, the narrative of the war begins to play over time. The subject of analysis was broadcasts on public and private radio stations featuring elites representing the politically generated division into two camps: liberal Poland and solidarity Poland. Using the tools of discourse analysis, I reconstruct the ways of telling about the war in the time intervals of fifty days. I point out what has changed in them since the start of 24.02.2022 after fifty, one hundred, one hundred fifty and two hundred days. In other words, I try to trace the process of reconstructing this story from extreme emotionality, through “taming the war” and its “professionalization” to instrumentalization. At the same time, I reconstruct the thematic agenda gradually obscuring informationally the war conflict – an event that initially denaturalized the order of reporting reality obtaining an understandable monopoly on audience attention.