Making Sense of the News in an Authoritarian Regime: Russian Television Viewers’ Reception of the Russia–Ukraine Conflict
Maxim Alyukov
Europe-Asia Studies, 2022, vol. 74, issue 3, 337-359
Abstract:
Scholars report contradictory findings regarding whether citizens trust media in autocracies. Relying on focus group methodology, this study uses Russian television viewers’ reception of the Russia–Ukraine conflict to investigate media perception in an autocracy. It argues that citizens in non-democracies lack the opportunities, motivation and tools to substantively process news. When perceiving news, they express both critical and supportive reactions towards the regime without integrating them into coherent views and thus support authoritarian equilibrium by being unable to articulate consistent opinions. This argument helps to explain the paradoxes of media (dis)trust and clarifies the process of media perception in authoritarian political systems.
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09668136.2021.2016633 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ceasxx:v:74:y:2022:i:3:p:337-359
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ceas20
DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2021.2016633
Access Statistics for this article
Europe-Asia Studies is currently edited by Terry Cox
More articles in Europe-Asia Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().