News Consumption in Rural Area: (Dis)Trust and Verification Strategies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14515/monitoring.2024.4.2572Keywords:
news consumption, rural residents, news trust, verification strategies, high choice media environmentAbstract
The article analyses the practices of media consumption in rural areas in the context of the collision between the increased demand for information amid the crisis and the limited resources for obtaining it and access to alternative sources. The empirical material is interviews conducted in July 2023 in the villages of the Vologda Region. The results show that despite the predominance of traditional media, the information environment in the village is relatively heterogeneous due to the consumption of news from new media and their supplementation by interpersonal communication. The complexity of the phenomenon of (dis)trust in news, fragmentation, and differentiation of justification logic are noted.
Distrust appears due to information inconsistency in different sources, the mismatch between news and perception of reality, unsatisfactory manner of reporting, and news content itself. Trust is often personalised and relies on the repetition of information, a reflection of news in the surrounding reality and logicality, and consistency of broadcasting. While declaring distrust of news, informants continue to consume such content and do not seek to verify the information. The “pragmatic trust” is becoming widespread. It implies reliance on intuition and heuristics, as well as devolution of responsibility for the credibility of news to “reliable others,” who are specific individuals both from the social environment of people and from the side of news authors. The role of political preferences is highlighted as media trust becomes a projection of trust in political institutions and specific individuals, a propensity to consume ideologically close content.
Acknowledgments. The results of the project “Russians’ Daily Social Practices under Exogenous Shocks”, carried out within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University) in 2024, are presented in this work.
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