Abstract

The article offers an empirical analysis of the ways in which Mexican press portrays Ukraine. To do this, this paper focuses on three major daily newspapers of Mexico, El Universal,La Jornadaand Milenio. The article offers a 12-month long diagnosis of the news, which discloses the agenda of objects and attributes regarding Ukraine. Therefore this study helps to explore the processes and factors that generate media image and communicate it to Mexican society. As far as methodology is concerned, a combination of two aspects was employed in this study. The first was a quantitative analysis of news reports. The second was a qualitative interpretation applied to discover the evaluative undertones of the stories based on content analysis. To this end, all the 689 stories analyzed in this paper are classified as positive, negative and neutral and grouped - according to their topic - into 8 major categories: Economy, Politics, International Relations, Society, Culture, Public Security, Sports and Miscellanea. This study focuses on all the news reports on Ukraine, including those, which briefly mention the country, its territories or people. Moreover, the main findings of the paper were contrasted with the aspirations of communicative strategies of current Ukrainian government in order to understand whether the present image of the country in Mexico is adequate or desirable. Therefore, the analysis clearly indicates the dark and bright sides of country's projection in three analyzed newspapers. All the aforementioned efforts aim at better positioning of Ukraine both in Mexican society and internationally.