Decoding Cultural Frames: How Ukrainian Mass Media Report about Cultural Public Events

Purpose. This research covers the issues of reformatting frames of cultural public events in mass media. The author identifies the problem of breaking the link between real cultural activity and the virtual reality of the media, emphasizing the negative impact on audiences. Public receives from media distorted picture of the world, in the way as it is exposed by the producers of information imagination. Media agenda forms the view of historical traditions, economic and political influences, since the media in Ukraine are dependent on their owners and politicians. Journalists, media publishers, media editors claim to have knowledge of society and impose agenda, which is theirs a subjective representation but not the reflection about the world in its diversity. Therefore, the key issue of this research is as follows: How could journalists create reports about culture events without distorting the picture of reality? Methods. The study has aimed to identify the potential of cultural themes for journalism through the prism of mass communication theory, taking into account the basic criteria of international journalism standard. Methods which have been used are: case study to outline the problem and discourse analysis to define trends of public messages creation and to understand their perception in a socio-cultural context. Results. Analyzing messages about specific cases of public events author has presents model for decoding of public event message on two levels – creation by initiators and perception by audiences in the context of political and cultural changes.