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Media Education (Mediaobrazovanie)
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ISSN 1994-4160
E-ISSN 1994-4195
2018, 58(3): 147-158
DOI: 10.13187/me.2018.3.147 www. ej ournal53 .com
Specification of Media Representation of Events in the Regional Information Space
Alexander Shuneyko a, Olga Chibisova a , *
a Komsomolsk-na-Amure State University - Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Russian Federation
Abstract
The subject of this article is the specifics of feeding the information which is topical for the whole society in regional newspapers; in particular it's asymmetry towards the data of the central press. The authors carry out a comparative analysis of the content of media representations of the political event (Navalny's march) in the federal and Khabarovsk print media, which made it possible to reveal a number of formal and substantial differences in the media image of the event, to fix new media phenomena. The theme of media representation is relevant for the theory and practice of journalism, and the transformation in the world and national information space (information warfare, loss of the presumption of information and truth by the world journalism) make this topic even more significant. The research methodology refers to a discursive approach, the authors attempt to analyze the headline complex of journalistic materials, identify the main semantic units of texts, and fix some speech techniques for creating a media image. The novelty of the work lies in the following provisions. The authors go beyond the media-centered approach and in the conclusion analyze the situation of mastering the text by the readership, highlighting two types of audiences according to the criterion of "information literacy". As an explanatory principle, the authors' notion of "a zero signs" is introduced to explain the pretention of the media with respect to certain facts. On this basis it is possible to classify different types of information consumers in the future. The empirical study makes it possible to record differences in the coverage of the event by federal and Khabarovsk print media, and also to reveal interesting phenomena of media representation, in particular, "smoothing out", "suppression", etc., which have a high level of heuristics. The study deserves attention, gives an increment of new information and raises problematic questions of theoretical and methodological plan.
Keywords: information space, data transmission, media representation, regional press, zero sign.
1. Introduction
The general orientation and the character of the information space development is an acute topic of scientific knowledge. New characteristics of the information space, caused by the change of technology and the deployment of global information systems, are qualitatively changing its essence. A particular interest is aroused by various modifications in the manifestation of this trend that are conditional on the national specifics of the country. The regional level of the information space of the Khabarovsk Territory is an integral part of the information space of Russia, and as such it is not only isomorphic to the information environment of the whole country, but also
* Corresponding author
E-mail addresses: a-shuneyko@yandex.ru (A.A. Shuneyko), olgachibisova@yandex.ru (O.V. Chibisova)
enriches it with its own information components. Therefore, today the significant attention of interested persons is caused by the study of the features of local mass media, due to their partial isolation and independence, despite their involvement in the global information field. In this paper, the information space of the Khabarovsk Territory is segmented and its part created by means of print media is considered.
2. Discussion
The perception of the term "information space" differs significantly in the Russian-speaking and English-speaking research traditions. Therefore, it is advisable to consider them in comparison.
In modern Russian-speaking science, there are several approaches related to the study of general and particular issues of the formation and development of the information space. One of them is a technical approach in which the information space is presented as a system that transfers, processes and stores information using technical means. The second can be recognized as humanitarian, where the information space is a collection of knowledge and data that is emerging and constantly changing in the process of the social evolution. Any geographical unit, ideological postulate, traditional belief and sphere of human activity can serve as a basis for its study. Since this research is conducted in the humanitarian approach, it is reasonable to consider the main directions of studying the information space within its framework.
The information space can be considered as a phenomenon of culture (Seregin, 2000), a phenomenon of communication (Nenashev, 2008), as a socio-psychological phenomenon (Chuikova, 2014), and so on. A.V. Seregin believes that the information space of a nation is not only a territorially limited and detached fragment of the global space, but also a qualitatively new habitat of the national culture. A.I. Nenashev adds to this approach a number of other approaches: technological, economic and political, based on the sphere of social life, which dominates the specific period of the development of the information space. L.Y. Chuikova proposes to create in schools an educational ecological information space and to form "access channels" of students' consciousness to an adequate social information space.
The information space can be arbitrarily large and arbitrarily small, starting from global (Iskevich, Kochtkova, 2017), passing to the territory of a country (Karlova, 2011), a region (Shuneyko, 2017) or a city (Lobanov, 2013) and ending with organization or an educational institution (Chuikova, 2014). For example, I.S. Iskevich and M.N. Kochtkova describe the distinguishing characteristics of locating a crime scene of copyright violations in the global information space, and O.S. Lobanov analyzes the disparity of the existing information systems of St. Petersburg and the ways of integrating them into a single information space. According to A.A. Shuneyko information space of a certain territory does not exist as an integral object, but it is a set of separate segments, distributed in general information flows and having a small specific weight with respect to them.
The information space can cover an entire nation (Seregin, 2000), the population of a country (Zaitova, 2011) or a separate person (Vodyanenko, 2012). So, T.M. Zaitova introduces into the scientific use the concept of "the information space of the population", interpreting it as a system of data about the surrounding world, continuously formed and changing in the course of interpersonal, group and mass communication of people. In the opinion of G.R. Vodyanenko the information environment of a particular person combines various information environments, the isolation or integration of which he/she regulates independently. The authors believe that the territorial or personal restriction of the information space is always conditional. It is difficult to imagine such a territory or such a person, as well as their totality, who or which would be rigidly delimited from other personalities or territories. The real history knows cases when artificial restrictions or barriers to the dissemination of information are established. For example, information blockades, where the totalitarian regimes put their countries or the practice of interacting with information of the Old Believers. But even in these extreme cases of prohibitions, information in one way or another interacts with the general flows. To say nothing of the times when all and any boundaries are diluteB and the localization of information spaces segments becomes extremely relative.
Scientists study the information space of various fields of human activity, such as, for example, healthcare (Gryaznova, 2015) or geodesy (Karpik, 2013), as well as functioning of various
arts such as fiction (Olesina, 2015) or cinema (Fedorov, 2017) in the information space. A.P. Karpik argues that the geodetic spatial information system is an effective tool for making decisions necessary for assessing the territories development sustainability. E.P. Olesina considers the influence which the modern forms of digital literature exert on the psychological state of teenagers and adolescents.
The proposed versions of comprehending the information space: its definitions, structure, features of functioning and evolution prospects are directly dependent on the scientific field in which research is conducted (culture studies, linguistics, political science, etc.), and the scientist's own position. So, for R.V. Gromov (Gromov, 2002), the information space is a totality of the set of information flows which interaction is directed at mass consciousness with the aim of its desirable transformation. G.R. Vodyanenko (Vodyanenko, 2012) defines it as a space of relationships and relationships that is formed as a result of the process of people's interaction with each other in the course of their active mastering the potential of the information environment (objects, events and real-world phenomena). V.V. Kulakov (Kulakov, 2008) considers the information space as a specific form of a social space, while M.A. Bogdanova (Bogdanova, 2006) presents it as a territory equipped with information resources and having journalistic and auditor characteristics.
At the same time, in modern English-language scientific literature, the term "information space", widely represented in Russian-language sources, practically is not used. Monitoring of the articles placed in an online scientific citation indexing service Web of Science does not give any work where this term would appear in the title. It occurs in a different meaning, related to specialized computer technologies (a technical approach of studying information space in Russia). The English-speaking tradition of media research manages without this term, just as it does without the term "media space" and "communicative space". Instead, more specific designations are used: the news media (Allern, Blach-0rsten, 2011), discourse (Higgins, 2004), mediatization (Hepp et al., 2015), news communication (Clausen, 2004), shaping the news (Benson, Hallin, 2007), soft news (Baum, 2002), etc.
Foreign scientific discourse is much more actively than the Russian one discusses the issue of the formation and broadcasting of news in the central and regional press. For example, L. Clausen investigates the process of "domestication of news" (Clausen, 2004). According to the author, the strategies used by national producers can be identified through comparative content analysis at 4 levels: global, national, organizational and professional. The article describes the processes of homogenization and diversification of news content that concurrently work in international news communication. The authors do not presume to challenge this statement in principle, but they believe that it is necessary to add one more level - translational - to these four one, which will take into account how the same news is broadcast in editions of various types. The simultaneous occurrence of the processes of globalization and "domestication" does not at all cancel out the fact that if we choose any one vector for consideration, the dominant process will be only one of them and it will level out the other. From our point of view, this is happening in the regional press.
A significant difference between the regional press and the national one is the language of the narrative. According to observations by U.G. Gurun and A.W. Butler (Gurun, Butler, 2010), when characterizing local companies, regional newspapers use far fewer negative words than when it comes to nonlocal companies. The authors attribute these variations to the financial involvement of media owners. Without denying this fact, it should be noted that, as will be shown below, the provincial press in Russia as a whole is milder in assessing any facts than the central one.
An important place in the Russian study of the information space is occupied by the problem of the transformation of information and the specifics of media presentations that contribute to the emergence of an artificially organized social reality (Karlova, 2011; Galimova, Tsvetova, 2017; Chibisova, 2017; Yanglyaeva, Yakova, 2017). In their work, E.Sh. Galimova and N.S. Tsvetova research the dynamics of media presentation of such a literary phenomenon as the so-called village prose created by a heterogeneous media, while O.V. Chibisova studies the construction of regional identity by the local mass media in the Khabarovsk Territory. M.M. Yanglyaeva and T.S. Yakova generalize that mass media, create and fix models of space-time relations, conditioned by the laws of that genre and form, within which the media fulfill their task. In addition, a significant part of media products is fabricated for economic and political benefits, for the sake of achieving which the public consciousness is subjected to manipulative influence (Alekseev et al., 2017).
At the same time, English-language studies approach the problem of media transformations of reality from another perspective, attaching the greatest importance to how far from the actual state of affairs the created media products can digress. For this purpose the scientists coined a new term "media credibility". Its main dimensions are source credibility focusing on the characteristics of the source of information and medium credibility focusing on the channel through which the message is sent (Golan, 2010). The audience-based variables such as age, income, education, gender, and race have an important influence in their assessments of media credibility. Of a certain interest is the analysis of the perception of the degree of reliability of online news from different sources by print and online newspaper journalists (Cassidy, 2007). W.P. Cassidy argues that print newspaper journalists rated Internet information as considerably less credible than did online newspaper journalists. He accounts the results of the survey for Internet reliance and professional role conceptions as significant predictors. Scott Maier (Maier, 2010) connects the analysis of users' perception with the analysis of source differences. The scientist studies newspapers, network television, cable television, and radio and comes to the conclusion that 60% of the topics coincide on news Web sites and legacy media, while only a third of news stories in blogs and social media correspond with those of mainstream media.
This state of affairs should involve detailed analysis of the information broadcast by these various sources. Meanwhile, unfortunately, now researchers use a single set of analytical operations for texts from all these sources. Such a disproportion can lead to distort conclusions and misguide theorizing. According to M. Kohring and J. Matthes (Kohring, Matthes, 2007), the multidimensional trust scale for media materials should include 4 components: trust in the selectivity of topics and facts, trust in the accuracy of depiction and journalistic assessment. From our point of view, it is necessary to take into account the fifth factor - the selectivity of the addressee. Our study shows that this factor is no less important and directly related to the four listed. The choice of the addressee is most clearly traced when opposing the central and regional press. These (and a number of other facts) gave J. Albright a reason to call the current stage of media development the era of fake news (Albright, 2017). He sees the main problem in the devaluation of the reader's confidence, which can be overcome by playing in a story of facts and information.
The construction of a media reality can cause disorientation of a person in the information space, the size of which directly depends on how good he/she is at comprehending the essence of the processes behind this construction (Yanglyaeva, Yakova, 2017). By the way, E. Galimova and N. Tsvetova note that "the pragmatic aspirations of the modern professional literary criticism and journalistic community provoke an oppositional rise in the status of readers' statements about the artistic work" (Galimova, Tsvetova, 2017: 650). In this connection A.I. Luchinkina (Luchinkina, 2015) introduces the concept of information-psychological immunity as the ability to process and critically analyze received and transmitted information. It should be emphasized that a person's ability to resist disorientation is directly related to the level of his/her communicative competence. Knowledge of the processes occurring in media, in particular, described in this article, broadcast through the media education system, can significantly increase the level of information immunity.
The problem of the synthesis of media education and media criticism received an extensive coverage in the works of A.V. Fedorov and A.A. Levitskaya (Fedorov, Levitskaya, 2015; Fedorov, Levitskaya, 2017). They are convinced that the main task of both is "to teach the audience not only to analyze media texts of any types, but also to understand the mechanisms of media texts' creation and functioning in society" (Fedorov , Levitskaya, 2017: 39). D. Buckingham outlined a strategy for developing media education on an international scale (Buckingham, 2001) and I.V. Chelysheva specified it for Russia (Chelysheva, 2016).
This research is also carried out in the mainstream of the listed directions of studying the media, but it has, in contrast to all the above-mentioned, a number of significant features. Mainly because the consideration of the information space in it is based on the comparison of objectively occurring events and the subjective social reality, constructed by the means of mass communication, which have turned from the means of transferring information to the system of its own production at the present stage. Secondly, it has a linguistic character and the identification of the content specificity of the media, namely, the newspapers of the Khabarovsk Territory, is conducted in comparison with the specific content of federal newspapers. For this, thirdly, the
authors introduce a new semiotic term - a zero sign - which is a specific way of transferring semantics.
3. Materials and methods
Any event causes an information flow that fixes verbal forms of its circumstances, character, consequence, and so on. The more significant the event is, the bigger information flow produces. At a certain stage of its broadcast, the information flow is embodied in a publication in the mass media. From the moment of its incarnation, it loses its natural character and partially passes into the category of artificial formations. Between the event itself, the information flow and information receivers, there integrate media with the information policy implemented by them.
Any information policy is to keep silent about one type of information, to accentuate another type of information and to invent a third type. In linguistic and semiotic terms, this amounts to the fact that publications constantly create zero signs and new materially expressed signs. A zero sign in the media arises from the suppression of actual information-significant events, of which existence the data receiver has learnt from other sources. A zero sign is a meaningful, functionally and semantically independent absence of an object or action within the framework of a certain text, the necessity of which presence is strictly prescribed by some social regulations (rules) or context (Shuneyko, Chibisova, 2017). New materially expressed signs arise on the basis of injecting false information in the text. The purpose of this study is to understand how this process is carried out in the regional press of the Khabarovsk Territory with a focus on the nature of the occurrence of zero signs.
4. Results
Identifying the intensional specifics of the regional media, rather than its extensional specifics, involves the use of various procedures. All these procedures are based on a comparison of the regional press with the central one. The object of comparison is the nature of the presentation of the material, the way of broadcasting information-relevant events, the identification of the differences in the newspapers that print about the same thing. The most consistently and clearly it can be revealed when considering how the central and regional newspapers cover the same information occasions.
These considerations formed the basis of this study and determined its nature and mechanism of conduct. There was chosen one important information occasion - Navalny's march, which took place on March 26, 2017. The choice is due to the fact that this event, significant in the political and cultural context of the country that affected all the regions of Russia, could not but find a response in all newspapers as one of their main tasks is to cover what is happening.
The starting point of the analysis was the most voluminous materials that were placed in the central publications. Obviously, their volume is determined by the volume of the printed organ, that is, by purely technical factors, and, strictly speaking, it cannot speak about intensional specifics, since different text volumes with different compression ratios can meaningfully broadcast the same information.
For this reason, the materials of the central press used for comparison were subjected to a thematic analysis. That is, there was identified the totality of the topics that were broadcast in these materials. After that, it was examined whether these topics are implemented in the regional publications and, if yes, how. The result is a clear set of topics and the nature of their implementation, which consistently demonstrates how the same informational occasion is broadcast by the central and regional press.
The very first stage of the analysis involves a simple identification, whether there is a mention of an information occasion in the newspaper. Twenty newspapers were examined for the information about Navalny's march: two central and eighteen regional newspapers (out of a total of 71 newspapers identified in the Khabarovsk Territory information space analysis, which is 25 %).
In 12 out of 18 regional newspapers, no mention was made of an information occasion which is a rather significant event for the whole country.
The list of newspapers that have not reported the event is the following:
1. Priamurskiye vedomosti - a regional weekly social and political newspaper - the founder Committee for Press and Mass Communications of the Government of the Khabarovsk Territory -circulation 1,500 copies.
2. Nash gorod Amursk - a city weekly informational newspaper - the founder Administration of the Urban Settlement "Town of Amursk" - circulation 1,300 copies.
3. Anyuyskiye perekaty - a regional weekly social and political newspaper - the founder Administration of the Nanaian Municipal District of the Khabarovsk Territory - circulation 1,750 copies.
4. Sel'skaya nov' - a regional weekly social and political newspaper - the founder Administration of the Khabarovsk Municipal District - circulation 1,800 copies.
5. Rabocheye slovo - a regional weekly social and political newspaper - the founder Municipal formation Verkhnebureinsky Municipal District - circulation 1,500 copies.
6. Vyazemskiye vesti - a regional weekly social and political newspaper - the founder Administration of Vyazemskogo Municipal District - circulation 5,050 copies.
7. Za stal' - a corporate weekly newspaper - the founder PTC "Amurmetal" - circulation 500 copies.
8. University life in KnAGU (Universitetskaya zhizn' v KnAGU) - a corporate monthly newspaper - the founder Komsomolsk-na-Amure State University - circulation 1,000 copies.
9. Priamurskiy kazachiy vestnik - a specialized monthly newspaper - the founder the District Cossack Society of the Khabarovsk Territory - circulation 3,500 copies.
10. Boyevoye bratstvo Priamur'ya - a specialized monthly social and political newspaper -the founder Khabarovsk Territorial Department of the All-Russian Public Organization "Boyevoye bratstvo" - circulation 2,000 copies.
11. Present Khabarovsk - an advertising and informational newspaper, issued 2 times a week - the founder LLC "Present" - circulation 18,000 copies.
12. Express Courier №1 - a city weekly advertising newspaper - the founder D.L. Shevchenko - circulation 26,000 copies.
The mere fact that three quarters of regional newspapers did not mention a significant information occasion needs to be adjusted or, at least, to be clarified in three points.
1. From the general list, it is necessary to exclude two advertising newspapers, which should not carry this type of information. Similar central newspapers also do not carry it. Everything is extremely correct here.
2. From the general list it is also possible, but with substantial reservations, to exclude two corporate and two specialized newspapers. This exception is not yet fully evident., because, for example, Energetik of FEGC (a monthly corporate publication founded by the JSC "Far Eastern Generating Company" with a circulation of 3,000 copies) in No. 4 (801) for April 2017 responded to the described event in a very specific and indicative manner. On page 5 under the heading "Against corruption", there was posted the material "Vasiliy Marchenko: We work strictly in the legal field", which is an interview with the director of internal audit of JSC "FEGC" Vasily Marchenko "about how the company is working for the purity in its ranks and why". That is, the suppression was combined with mentioning the actual topic in a completely different vein. The publishers have chosen a win-win situation in the face of authorities: we know what is happening in the country, but we do not speak about it, moreover, we emphasize that we are doing fine and everything that happens has nothing to do with us.
3. District newspapers can explain the suppression by the fact that the events happening in the country immediately lose relevance for their territories. The publishers know, but do not talk about what they know.
But even taking into account these clarifications, two of which are extremely arbitrary, it turns out that at least 12 % of regional publications do not cover the information that is very important for the country as a whole. Thus, these publications serve the de-actualization of the information and at the same time dilute it. Considering that in rural areas the number of Internet users and accepted TV programs is fewer than in urban ones, the role of such suppression is significantly increased. Informing the population is done in doses, taking into account a number of considerations that are not acceptable in the format of a free press.
No less interesting picture is observed when analyzing exactly how the information is fed. The following newspapers were taken for analysis:
1. Essence of Time (Sut' vremeni) - a daily All-Russian political newspaper - the founder S.Ye. Kurginyan - circulation 8,000 copies.
2. Moskovskij Komsomolets - a daily All-Russian social and political newspaper - the founder CJSC "Editorial office of the newspaper "Moskovskij Komsomolets"- circulation 950,000 copies.
3. Moskovskij Komsomolets in Khabarovsk - a regional annex to the federal edition - the founder CJSC "Editorial office of the newspaper "Moskovskij Komsomolets" - circulation 12,500 copies.
4. Komsomolskaya Pravda Khabarovsk - a regional annex to the federal edition - the founder JSC Publishing House "Komsomolskaya Pravda" - circulation 10,000 copies.
5. Khabarovskiy ekspress - a city weekly social and political newspaper - the founder S.A. Glukhov - circulation 12,100 copies.
6. Khabarovskiy kray segodnya - a weekly regional social and political newspaper - the founder ANO "Center for Support of Social Initiatives "Open Region" - circulation 10,000 copies.
7. Dal'nevostochnyy Komsomol'sk - a city social and political newspaper issued 2 times a week - the founder Administration of the city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur - circulation 10,000 copies.
Below is given an example of the implementation of the topic, which is mentioned in all seven newspapers under analysis, "the general state of people", dividing it into three parts: the description of the rally in Moscow, Khabarovsk and Komsomolsk-on-Amur.
Moskovskij Komsomolets (Moscow). ... The first deafening whistle was heard when a young fellow raised a sign "Let's bring Medvedev to justice" over his head. Due to the fact that the action had not been agreed on, there were practically no participants with posters there. Those who dared to display them were almost immediately detained by the police. "It should be hung on Pushkin, in this case they will not detain anyone", at the top of her voice screamed a woman who was standing on the nearby bench. So the poet became the first protester who could hold banners with impunity. <...> The protesters initially reacted with a laugh to a monotonous voice in the loudspeaker, which called for "expressing their civic position on an agreed platform in Sokolniki", and then they completely stopped noticing it.
Komsomolskaya Pravda Khabarovsk (Moscow). Two streams converged on Tverskoy Boulevard. "The participants" of the procession and the unhappy, trying to get into the subway through this human traffic jam.
- Guys, do you have nothing else to do?! - a man of about 50 years was rowing with his hands in the human stream as if against waves in the sea. - You had better clean your yards, organize a subbotnik!
However, no one answered him.
And when the people began to crawl away from Tverskoy in all directions, many amicably moved to the cash desks of the nearest "McDonald's". The tail of the queue began at the entrance.
- Rally is rally, - some guy laughed, - lunch is to be on time.
Essence of Time (Khabarovsk). ... On the warnings of law enforcement officers about the illegality of the action, the activists responded with cries of "Politsai!". <...> The activists tried to provoke a conflict with the forces of law and order. According to unconfirmed reports, some of the provocateurs were detained, to which the crowd responded with cries of "Traitors!" and "Salary is worth more than honor!"
Moskovskij Komsomolets in Khabarovsk (Khabarovsk). ... Everything that was happening (arrests of activists) all those present accompanied by shouts of "Shame!". Then they went on a "peaceful walk" to Komsomolskaya Square.
Khabarovskiy ekspress (Khabarovsk). ... Then the chief of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia in Khabarovsk, police colonel Alexander Prokhorets went out to communicate with the participants of the rally. He also explained to the citizens that they had gathered for an unauthorized event, and even tried to convince people that they themselves do not understand who they support by going out into the street. However, the head of the city administration of the MIA was ridiculed and cut short.
Khabarovskiy kray segodnya (Khabarovsk). ... It is advisable that the animators from politics should study legislation in more detail. And try to understand that defiling through the streets (even, alas, without an orchestra), maybe useful in the sense of an influx of adrenaline. But in terms of approaching the declared goal it is a very dubious waste of time.
Dal'nevostochnyy Komsomol'sk (Komsomolsk-on-Amur). On March 26, the citizens of Komsomolsk marched against corruption along the streets of the City of Youth. The march was timed to coincide with opposition rallies throughout the country. It all started with a meeting dedicated to the project "Urban Environment". Immediately after it, a column of young people moved along the streets of Komsomolsk from the embankment of the city, ch anting slogans "No corruption". The column passed along Mira Avenue and turned towards Lenin Square.
When comparing these text fragments with each other, one should bear in mind that the differences between them can be caused by a mass of external factors: the volume of the newspaper, the manner of reporting that it supports, the methods used to attract the reader's attention, the individual style of the journalist, the nature of the described realities, etc. But whatever they are caused, they show a rather curious tendency. The dynamics of the transmission of the event in the central press is higher than in the regional press. It seems that the central press is focused on an accelerated chronotope, while the regional one - on a slow-moving chronotope.
This is most clearly seen from the comparison of the general nominations of the event and the predicates used in its description, since they fix the convergence of the space-time coordinates at a single point. The central press uses nominations and predicates associated with dynamic actions: the action, two streams converged, a human traffic jam. The regional press uses nominations and predicates associated with neutral, slow actions: a peaceful walk, an unauthorized event, defiling through the streets, procession, marching, and the column passed.
It seems that behind the difference in chronotopes there is not only the different rhythm of life that has become a common place when the capital and the province are opposed. Probably, this difference signals more direct and indirectly cautious ways of presenting information.
The general set of topics and the specifics of the nature of their implementation in the central and regional press are recorded with the help of the following summary table 1.
From the summary table of the nature of the implementation of topics, it is possible to draw various conclusions. We confine ourselves to those that directly point to general trends. These trends were formulated as obvious consequences from the analysis of the translation of a topic and their totality. In a number of cases, the nature of the translation of different topics implements one trend. And all of them together show the direction of the information policy, which is adhered to by most newspapers in the Khabarovsk Territory.
Table 1. Topics and the nature of their implementation
Essence of Time Moskovskij Komsomolets Moskovskij Komsomolets in Khabarovsk Komsomolskaya Pravda Khabarovsk Khabarovskiy ekspress Khabarovskiy kray segodnya Dalnevostochny Komsomolsk
Circumstances of preparation V V V V V V 0
Political component V V 0 V 0 V 0
General state of people V V V V V V V
Availability of slogans V V 0 0 0 0 V
Availability of symbolics V V 0 V 0 0 0
Behavior of the police V V V V V 0 V
Youth participation V V 0 V V V V
Availability of statistics V V V V 0 V V
Journalistic evaluation V V 0 V V V 0
Analytical assessment V 0 0 V 0 0 0
Possible consequences V 0 0 V 0 0 0
Portrait of Navalny 0 V 0 0 0 0 0
Photos from the rally 0 V 0 V V 0 V
Contact with other rallies V V V 0 V 0 0
1. The sharpness of the event is smoothed out. This happens already at the level of the names of materials. The comparison of the titles of materials in the metropolitan and regional press shows that the semantics of acute conflict are replaced by the semantics of randomness and insignificance: "Political War" in the column "Summary from the theater of military operations" (Essence of Time), "Alexey Navalny led fighters against corruption on the street" (Komsomolskaya Pravda Khabarovsk), "More than a thousand people participated in the Khabarovsk anticorruption rally" (Moskovskij Komsomolets in Khabarovsk); "Protest with sneakers on the neck" (Moskovskij Komsomolets); "March against corruption" (Dal'nevostochnyy Komsomol'sk); "Teenagers detained at the meeting of Navalny: Uncle Lesha, your 'nets' dragged us into the paddy wagon!" (Komsomolskaya Pravda Khabarovsk); "You are being fooled. And you can walk" (Komsomolskaya Pravda Khabarovsk); "The explosion in social networks, but not in society" (Khabarovskiy kray segodnya); "A rally that was not there" (Khabarovskiy ekspress).
2. The scale of the event is decreased. This is achieved by excluding the general context. All-Russian action takes the form of a provincial demonstration. Compare: "In Russia, going out into the streets was tested. It was organized by forces clearly not burdened with respect for legislation. Street actions, mostly illegal, took place in more than 70 cities of the country" (Essence of Time). And: "On March 26 at 13:20 on the area near the city pond people began to gather for so -called anti-corruption rally. <...> 'The peaceful walk' of the crowd of many thousands, which had got considerably depleted by the time, ended near police station No. 6" (Moskovskij Komsomolets in Khabarovsk). "At the end of the rally, the citizens decided to turn the event into a procession. Khabarovsk residents went on a 'peaceful walk' along the central street of the city" (Khabarovskiy ekspress). "Throughout the movement of the column, it was accompanied by police officers. <...> The participants walked strictly along the sidewalk, and crossed the road through a pedestrian crossing to the green light of the traffic light" (Dal'nevostochnyy Komsomol'sk).
3. The political component of the event is hushed up, and social struggle is transferred to the category of personal struggle for power. Accordingly, the mass social confrontation is replaced by a personal confrontation. And this shifts the focus of attention from the political problem to specific individuals. "A modest fighter with corruption went out to a rally in sneakers for $289" (Komsomolskaya Pravda Khabarovsk). "With an unsystematic bid for power, the main thing is always (always!) - 'What do we oppose?' No matter whether it is a 'velvet' revolution, rebellion, civil conflict or even war, a necessary condition is destructivism (Komsomolskaya Pravda Khabarovsk). "And then again the question arises: beside another conquered step on the way to power (does anyone think that all who are 'against the authority' do not want to be it themselves?), what did they want to achieve?" (Khabarovskiy kray segodnya).
4. The protesters' voice in the regional press is reduced to zero. In this way they become an impersonal mass that does not have a proper opinion, dutifully or unwillingly fulfilling someone else's will. "The teenagers came to an illegal rally because of the promised money" (Komsomolskaya Pravda Khabarovsk); "When a nation is made a fool by its new advocates, it's already a shame. And it's scary." (Komsomolskaya Pravda Khabarovsk); "The ideological inspirers of the action placed many people in an ambiguous position before the law" (Khabarovskiy kray segodnya); "... tried to convince people that they do not understand who they support when they go out into the street" (Khabarovskiy ekspress).
This is most clearly manifested in the fact that central publications actively cite specific cries and slogans of protesters. For example, the newspaper Essence of Time writes: "The protesters chanted slogans 'Russia without corruption', 'Bring Medvedev to justice', "Khabarovsk is against corruption!", "We are power here!", "Russia without Putin!". Moskovskij Komsomolets: The crowd was carrying posters "Corruption is stealing the future!", "Don't give up yourselves!", "We are the power here!", "We are many!", "Dismiss the government!", "I would like such a house like a duck has!", "We are not slaves to you!", "Down with the police state!", "We are wicked. And our mood is not very good", "It's not cultural to steal!" The regional newspapers do not cite them at all or mention them casually: "Before the beginning of its movement, the police detained six people, who because of their posters were considered organizers of the action" (Dal'nevostochnyy Komsomol'sk). Moreover, sometimes the voice of protesters is replaced by the translation of the voice of the authorities, for example, by the transmission of words of the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for Khabarovsk (Khabarovskiy ekspress).
5. The central press pays attention to the symbols of the movement. "The new symbol of protest was the sneakers, which the participants of the action hung around their necks. <... > Everywhere people carried rubber, plastic or inflatable yellow ducklings" (Moskovskij Komsomolets). The regional press either objectifies this symbols "When the riot police dragged Lescha into the paddy wagon, he rested his foot in the ... sneaker. One company took advantage of the opportunity and solemnly announced that this was its product" (Komsomolskaya Pravda Khabarovsk), or does not mention it at all. This is an important symptom. A symbol is an integral part of any organized movement. The absence of a symbol marks the absence of an organized unity and reduces the participants to the rank of an occasional crowd.
The actions of the authorities, youth participation and statistics are described by the central and regional press in equal detail and do not bypass attention.
Analytical assessments of what is happening are brought only by the central press; the regional one does not mention them at all. This clearly fits into the general nature of the event's broadcast, its de-actualization. Analytical evaluation can only be of something large and important. The very fact of its absence reduces the scale and importance.
It is noteworthy that an open direct journalistic assessment is present in most publications. This is natural: there is appraisal in any journalistic text. It is hard to imagine an absolutely neutral text. If there are two main objects of description in the text, the positive and negative estimates are distributed unequally between them. At the same time, it can be said that the central press is trying to maintain neutrality, while in the regional one the negative assessment is given to the opposition, and the positive one is on the side of the authorities.
5. Conclusion
Summarizing all these trends, we can say that the information policy of the regional press is aimed at lowering the significance, importance and political component of the event. It is implemented in the ways listed above.
The nature of the effect of this type of information policy on the reader can be different. It is determined by the degree of awareness of the reader, is reduced to two major types and entails unequal consequences.
The first type is realized when the newspaper falls into the hands of the reader, who uses not only a single source of information, that is, besides this edition he/she draws information from the Internet or, at least, from TV and the central press. Such a reader perceives the lack of information as zero signs, reads their semantics "the publishers for certain reasons do not consider it possible to report this and that and that" and come to the conclusion. The degree of trust in the publication is significantly reduced with such a reader. The second type is presented when the newspaper falls into the hands of a reader who does not use other sources of information. In this case, the classical form of suppression is realized, on the basis of which the reader develops a distorted view of reality. It should be emphasized that, in essence, the first and the second type are destructive ways of transferring information and in the long term they can bring nothing good to some particular publications. The publishers maintaining this type of information policy, it guarantees a reduction in demanded circulation.
The findings of this study are limited to the publication of a number of newspapers in the Khabarovsk Territory and may be considered unrepresentative for the entire regional press. However, the comparison of the regional press with the central one has made it possible to identify certain trends (smoothing out the acuteness of the event, reducing its scale, concealing the political component, etc.), which open up prospects for further research in this direction.
The training of a literate reader and media education as a whole presuppose not only the existence of a reliable factual base, but also a correct definition of those dominant trends that are realized in the press of this or that type and level. In this sense, the conclusions obtained as a result of the research can serve not only as an obvious illustrative material for characterizing the current state of the regional press, but also determine the nature of the correct or adequate perception of the materials placed in it. In other words, the formulated tendencies can be perceived as elements of general recommendations on information security, knowledge of which is necessary, ideally, to anyone interacting with media objects.
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