The German media are repeatedly accused of providing one-sided coverage of arms deliveries to Ukraine, even though there are normative expectations for balanced reporting. Laura Liebig, Dr. Gregor Wiedemann, and Prof. Dr. Katharina Kleinen-von Königslöw investigated whether this criticism is justified. Using AI-supported content analysis, they evaluated articles from 14 leading German media outlets from 2022 and 2023.
The findings paint a nuanced picture: Pro and con positions on arms deliveries were, on the whole, represented in a balanced manner. However, the diversity of the arguments presented remained comparatively low.
The article was written as part of the project Few-Shot Learning for Automated Content Analysis in Communication Science (FLACA), a collaboration between the HBI and the University of Hamburg.
The Open Access publication “Normative Ideals and Empirical Realities: Viewpoint Diversity in the Discourse on German Arms Deliveries to Ukraine,” appeared in the journal Journalism and is available here.
Abstract
Criticism of media coverage is an essential democratic mechanism to hold journalism accountable, yet it can also foster distrust and perceptions of media bias. This study examines such tensions through the case of the German media discourse on arms deliveries to Ukraine. Using accusations of one-sided reporting as a starting point, we theorize normative expectations of media diversity in war-related policy discourse and empirically assess how leading German news outlets represented competing viewpoints. Drawing on a two-year corpus (2022-2023) from 14 Leitmedien and employing a hierarchical supervised machine-learning approach based on (large) language models, we classify stances and frames to compute standard diversity indices. The results reveal a balanced distribution of supportive and opposing stances, yet a low diversity of argumentative frames. This pattern suggests that German media exhibited a liberal-aggregative model of diversity, emphasizing coexistence of opinions over deliberative engagement with competing interpretations. Despite frequent claims of uniform pro-government bias, our findings indicate that coverage was more heterogeneous than critics claimed. However, they also point to limited argumentative depth and a tendency to reproduce existing political logics. We discuss the methodological and normative challenges of quantifying diversity, particularly under conditions of war and uncertainty, and argue that criticism of media bias often reflects broader transformations in the perception of journalistic diversity.
Liebig, Laura; Wiedemann, Gregor; Kleinen-von Königslöw, Katharina (2026): “Normative Ideals and Empirical Realities: Viewpoint Diversity in the Discourse on German Arms Deliveries to Ukraine”. Journalism (online first). https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849261503627