The faces of war – the human interest frame in onet.pl and wp.pl’s materials reporting on the war in Ukraine during the first year of the conflict

<ns3:p>When analyzing current international relations, it is necessary to move beyond the frames of the central state, as non-state agents, including the media, may have a significant influence in this area. These factors influence political decision makers through their influence on international and national public opinion. This article presents the results of a frame analysis of how the war in Ukraine was reported on horizontal news websites in Poland, onet.pl and wp.pl, during the first year of the conflict. The goal of the present research was to define the presence and method of using the frame of human interest. When analyzing the journalistic material, we used a quantitative, but above all, a qualitative analysis of the content. The study sample included 1,200 items. According to these assumptions, the newsrooms of both news services most often employed the conflict frame, and their second most frequently employed frame was human interest. This was constructed by invoking the experiences of the units or groups. The websites’ materials containing the human interest frame saw the presence of personalization, dramatization, and emotionalization. In wp.pl’s and onet.pl’s texts containing the human interest frame and related to the war in Ukraine, we identified three categories of hero: victim, enemy, and hero. Both outlets were most frequently reported by the victims. The means of using the category of hero in press materials were similar, as were the differentiation of the categories of actors in the texts.</ns3:p>