Alignment, Fractures, and Alternating Leadership in the Global Media Coverage of the Ukraine War

To gain new insights into global media coverage of the Ukraine war, we analyzed 190,864 English-language news posts published on the Facebook accounts of 112 media outlets across five continents during the first three and a half years of conflict. Using an integrated pipeline that combines network analysis, topic modeling, framing analysis, and audience-engagement modeling, we show how global media align on exogenous shocks—such as battlefield developments, weapons deliveries, nuclear risk, or accountability milestones—but diverge in framing sub-angles. We also demonstrate how narratives resonate differently with audiences across geopolitical blocs and how alternating leadership between U.S. and European allies structures the transatlantic information environment. Together, these findings reveal how alignment and alternating leadership shape global media narratives of war and support a novel model of Alliance-Linked Narrative Dynamics (ALND), in which domestic institutions, alliance ties, and platform logics condition both conflict narration and public interpretations of costs, responsibilities, and diplomacy.