Abstract
Introduction. Political talk shows remain a visible segment of Ukrainian public discourse,
yet manipulative practices across programmes are rarely measured with one reproducible proce-dure.
Relevance and purpose. The study aims to identify, operationalise and statistically assess manipulative practices in 20 purposively selected episodes of four political talk shows in the 2019 electoral and post-electoral context. Developments in 2021 are used only for contextualisation and are not part of the empirical sample.
Methodology. Content analysis was combined with critical discourse analysis based on Nor-man Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of text, discursive practice and social practice. The sample comprises 20 full episodes (5 per programme; 2,280 minutes). The coding matrix contains six operationalised categories. CDA units were a host question, a completed guest response, a moderator intervention and a data-presentation block; presuppositions, modality, evaluative lex-is, attribution of responsibility, framing and legitimising/delegitimising functions were examined. Intra-coder stability was assessed with Cohen’s κ, Krippendorff’s α and ICC. Between-programme differences were tested with Fisher’s exact test; Cramér’s V and 95% Wilson intervals were report-ed. The Cochran–Armitage trend test was not applied because no a priori ordering of programmes was theoretically justified.
Results. Episodes with deviations accounted for 80% in “Ekho Ukrainy”, 60% in “Pravo na Vladu”, 40% in “Svoboda Slova Savika Shustera”, and 20% in “Svoboda Slova”. The most salient practices were pseudo-sociology, manipulative question framing and undisclosed conflicts of interest. Fisher’s exact test did not indicate statistically significant between-programme differences (p = 0.46); Cramér’s V was 0.45 and the confidence intervals were wide and overlapping.
Conclusions. The observed ordering is descriptive and does not establish a monotonic trend or a causal effect of media ownership. The contribution lies in applying a formalised matrix with common coding rules, a stability check and statistical assessment to complete episodes across programmes. The findings are exploratory and require replication with a larger sample and inde-pendent coders.
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