Antropologicheskij forum, 2016, no. 31

“FACTS WE TRUST”: ATTITUDES TO NEWS DURING SOCIAL POLARIZATION

Elena Malaia

Russian State University for the Humanities
6 Miusskaya Sq., Moscow, Russia
lenmamalen()gmail.com

Abstract: This article focuses on the way the same news is perceived by different people during political conflict depending on the their worldviews. The most important questions in this work are what are the reasons for trusting or mistrusting the news, and are the triggers for these attitudes found in the media or elsewhere? This work is based on 25 interviews on the Ukrainian crisis of February — March 2014. All materials were collected in 2014 in Simferopol, Crimea. Informants point out how strong the stream of news was and how it forced them to read articles and watch TV to check out whether the information about certain events was true or not. In this context, two facts were discovered: а) the common discursive field for seemingly different sides of the conflict; b) the informants’ belief that truth can be logically revealed. However, during the analysis of the narratives it became clear that in spite of their confidence in the rationality of the news, the informants only trust news that coincides with their worldviews.

Keywords: news, social polarisation, news agenda, frames, newslore, medialore, Crimea, Ukraine, Independence square, Maidan.

To cite: Malaia E., '“Fakty, v kotorye veryat”: freymirovanie novostey v usloviyakh polyarizatsii obshchestva' [“Facts We Trust”: Attitudes to News during Social Polarization], Antropologicheskij forum, 2016, no. 31, pp. 180–208.

URL: http://anthropologie.kunstkamera.ru/files/pdf/031/malaya.pdf