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This article examines inter-individual differences in the communication patterns of German political journalists by analyzing a snapshot of the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war discourse on Twitter. Journalists exhibit significant variation in Twitter activity and posting of individual contributions. We use aggregated individual data from content analysis as the foundation for network comparisons. By analyzing war communication from an aggregated individual perspective, the study addresses understudied aspects of journalists’ social media use. Specifically, we analyze how tweets correspond to war/peace journalism framing and how journalistic accounts within this network relate to this distribution. To achieve this, we identify indicators of war/peace journalism framing over a five-month research period starting in September 2022. The content analysis reveals that peace journalism framing predominates over war journalism framing at the aggregated actor level. However, journalists inclined toward war journalism framing occupy significantly higher ranks in network centrality. Additionally, we observe substantial inter-individual differences among journalists in terms of opinion expression in tweets, with a positive association between a journalist’s tendency to express opinions and their centrality rank. The article illustrates how network-based attributes and insights from journalistic framing analysis can be integrated to explore inter- and intra-individual dynamics among journalistic actors.
Nuernbergk et al. (Mon,) studied this question.