"Public trust in institutions is a key prerequisite for effective crisis management. However, the rise of populism and misinformation in recent years made it increasingly difficult to maintain institutional trust. Despite this recognition, we still lack a systematic understanding of how exposure to
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misinformation and populist political orientation affect people’s trust in institutions. This paper fills this gap by adopting an original approach to trust, focusing on prospective trust rather than trust in the present, and by comparing four countries led by populist leaders during the pandemic – Brazil, Poland, Serbia, and the United States. The comparative design allows us to consider not only the role of individual-level factors (populist attitudes and misinformation exposure) but also the role of different approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic adopted in the four countries. The study utilizes data from a cross-sectional survey, carried out between November and December 2022 (N = 5000). Our findings show that populist attitudes are the most significant predictor of distrust in political institutions in all four countries. Believing in false information related to COVID-19, on the other hand, has a stronger impact on distrust in expert institutions – public health authorities, scientists, and medical professionals. The data also highlight the importance of local context and different approaches to handling the pandemic in the dynamics of trust. In Poland and Serbia, populist voters have more trust in both healthcare authorities as well as in political institutions; however, in Brazil and the United States, populist voters were more likely to distrust expert institutions." (Abstract)
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"In recent years, links between selective news exposure and political polarisation have attracted considerable attention among communication scholars. However, while the existence of selective exposure has been documented in both offline and online environments, the evidence of its extent and its im
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pact on political polarisation is far from unanimous. To address these questions, and also to bridge methodological and geographical gaps in existing research, this paper adopts a media repertoires approach to investigate selective news exposure and polarisation in four Eastern European countries – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Serbia. Using a combination of population surveys, expert surveys and qualitative interviews, the data for the study were collected between November 2019 and May 2020. We identify five types of news repertoires based on their relative openness to counter-attitudinal sources, and show that selective news repertoires are present in 29% of the entire sample. Our findings also reveal significant cross-country differences, with the more selective news repertoires more prominent in countries characterised by higher levels of polarisation. Furthermore, while the selection of news sources is in line with" (Abstract)
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"Existing research on factors informing public perceptions of expert trustworthiness was largely conducted during stable periods and in longestablished Western liberal democracies. This article asks whether the same factors apply during a major health crisis and in relatively new democracies. Drawin
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g on 120 interviews and diaries conducted during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Serbia, we identify two additional factors not acknowledged in existing research, namely personal contact with experts and experts’ independence from political elites. We also examine how different factors interact and show how distrust of experts can lead to exposure to online misinformation." (Abstract)
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"Existing research on media and the COVID-19 pandemic is largely based on quantitative data, focused on digital media, limited to single-country studies, and often West-centred. As such, it has limited capacity to provide a holistic account of the causes and consequences of audience engagement with
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COVID-19 news, or to consider the impact of systemic political and media factors. To compensate for that, we examine a large set of qualitative interviews and media diaries collected in four eastern European countries during the first wave of the pandemic. We show that changes in news consumption—including the resurgence of television and decline of print consumption—were not driven solely by audience demand for up-to-date information, but also by practical constrains of home-bound life in lockdown, and the introduction of live briefings. Our findings underscore disruption and uncertainty as key elements of audience experiences and highlight the markedly privatized and depoliticized nature of public debate in the early phase of the pandemic. We argue that the pandemic was an unpredictable, open-ended, and exhausting media event with high potential for divisiveness and polarization, especially in contexts marked by low levels of media freedom, declining democratic standards, and elite-led politicization of the crisis." (Abstract)
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"[The authors] delve into the fascinating world of television under communism, using it to test a new framework for comparative media analysis. To understand the societal consequences of mass communication, the authors argue that we need to move beyond the analysis of media systems, and instead focu
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s on the role of the media in shaping cultural ideals and narratives, everyday practices and routines. Drawing on a wealth of original data derived from archival sources, programme and schedule analysis, and oral history interviews, the authors show how communist authorities managed to harness the power of television to shape new habits and rituals, yet failed to inspire a deeper belief in communist ideals. This book and their analysis contains important implications for the understanding of mass communication in non-democratic settings, and provides tools for the analysis of media cultures globally." (Publisher description)
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"This article develops a number of conceptual and methodological proposals aimed at furthering a firmer agenda for the field of socialist television studies. It opens by addressing the issue of relevance of the field, identifying three critical contributions the study of socialist television can mak
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e to media, communication and cultural studies. It then puts forward a number of proposals tied to three key issues: strategies of overcoming the Cold War framework that dominates much of existing literature; the importance of a multilayered analysis of socialist television that considers its cultural, political as well as economic aspects; and the ways in which we can challenge the prevalence of methodological nationalism in the field." (Abstract)
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"This guide provides students and researchers with a clear set of outlines and discussions of particular methods of research in memory studies. It offers not only expert appraisals of a range of techniques, approaches and perspectives in memory studies, but also focuses on key questions of methodolo
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gy in order to help bring unity and coherence to this new field of study. Key Features: Investigates community remembering and memory in personal narratives Explores the localisation of official national memory Attends to painful pasts and disrupted memory Examines vernacular remembering and personalised media Focuses on the production of social memory in the media Analyses the dynamics of remembering in public confessions." (Publisher description)
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"Two major conclusions can be drawn on the basis of our case study. First, our analysis confirms that war reporting is characterized by a confluence of nationalist and sexist discourse. This discursive universe restricts the lives of women to a rather limited set of roles tied to the private domain
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– caring mothers, loving wives, dutiful daughters and sisters – and expects them to reproduce the nation both biologically and culturally. Indeed, the television coverage of the military conflict between the Yugoslav People’s Army and the Slovenian Territorial Defence in 1991 was almost devoid of female actors, let alone women who would appear in professional, public capacity. Out of all news reports dedicated to the conflict over the course of 20 days, women appear as participants in fewer than 5 percent of them and, of these, the vast majority are identified as wives and mothers, whose main concerns are achieving biological reproduction and protection of their families and their nation." (Conclusion, page 1057)
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