The feedback on conflicts and disputes about Macedonia in American newspapers in 1991-2009

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The USA is the world leader in terms of the number of the dailies. Most of them are regional or local in character, but some of the US newspapers are very powerful and have a global influence, i.e. "The New York Times", "The Washington Post", "The Wall Street Journal", "The Christian Science Monitor" and "USA Today". Thus the global range of audience of some American papers is the reason why it is worth doing the systematic reconstruction of the discourse on Macedonian independence presented in the US newspapers. The aim of this article is to present some research findings referring to the reconstruction of configuration of actors, events, topics and values presented in media accounts of that country. The research is based on the examination of texts that were published in the years 1991-2009 in selected American newspapers available in America’s Newspapers database. There were 380 texts (app. 250 thous. words) in the corpus. The first level of analysis was the lexical examination of the texts. The next level focused on the computer assisted content analysis that allowed the author to examine the key elements of journalist messages in subsequent years. In the last stage of analysis the author applied statistical measurements using a multidimensional information processing method (the factor analysis). They enabled to extract five factors representing the main areas of press discourse on Macedonia: 1) the animosity of the neighbouring countries towards Macedonia and – simultaneously - Macedonia’s striving for the recognition in the world; 2) the conflict in Kosovo and its influence on the situation in Macedonia; 3) the media interest in the political situation in Macedonia, especially the electoral one; 4) the dispute on the position and the role of Macedonia in international relations; 5) the efforts of the Albanians to obtain equal rights and improve their status in Macedonia.