Meet the experts on the war in Ukraine

This study explores the selection and representation of expert voices in the coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict by mapping the linguistic and stylistic choices editors make when soliciting the opinions of academic, professional or independent sources. It uses a representative dataset of articles from a range of elite English-language opinion-making news outlets (the BBC, CNN, Euronews, the Independent, the Irish Times, the National Post, and Newsweek), sourced between February 2022 and June 2024. It identifies salient patterns of how (not so diverse) experts on the war in Ukraine are introduced as sources of credible information and newsworthy opinion. It illustrates how both credibility and newsworthiness (realized mainly through linguistic markers of eliteness) are discursively constructed through a range of strategies of naming and characterizing the sources and representing their speech directly or via editorializing. In the opinion-making news media, these linguistic patterns of source and voice representation have a bearing on the sense of validity of argumentation, the projection of neutrality, and the creation of audience engagement.