HUNGARIAN LANGUAGE MEDIA IN ROMANIA: SETTING MINORITY PERCEPTIONS OF RUSSIA’s WAR AGAINST UKRAINE

This paper studies the framing of Russia’s war against Ukraine in Hungarian language online media in Romania. It considers the research of various authors and organizations who described the Hungarian language media system in Romania as subject to the Hungarian Government’s influence, due to the centralized media ownership and financing structure, but also as supporting ethnic parallelism. As recent surveys show the Hungarian ethnic minority in Romania is less critical towards Russia’s aggression of Ukraine, in contrast to the Romanian majority, our research objective is to study how the war in Ukraine was presented to the Hungarian minority. We conduct a content analysis of news published between May 2024 – January 2025, to problematize on the potential of the media to shape the public perceptions of its consumers.