Sense-making of conflicting political news among Baltic Russian-speaking audiences

Susceptibility of the Estonian Russian-speaking Audience to the Spread of Fake News and Information Disorder in the News Media

“…Attention is also paid to text-level elements: links to trusted news sources, citations, active links, and clickbait headlines. They strive for independence in their sense-making (Vihalemm & Juzefovičs 2020b) showing self-reliant media-related behavior (Vihalemm & Juzefovičs 2020a).…”

“…Despite widespread skepticism and distrust of media organizations, members of Russian-speaking audiences in Estonia strive for independence in their judgement, however, they still view Russia's hegemonic geopolitical narratives (Vihalemm & Juzefovičs, 2020b). The same researchers conclude that news media audiences have developed "self-reliant media-related behavior strategies (juxtaposition of sources, interpreting clues) that allow them to manage the partial dysfunctionalities of the media system while not to fully abandon trust because this is a useful tool for managing complexity" (Vihalemm & Juzefovičs, 2020a , p. 3).…”

‘They say we are all zombies’: Rethinking the role of audiences in a mediatized international conflict

“…They were at first interviewed one by one in 2017 with those informants who followed political information in the media on a regular basis being interviewed again in 2018 (six in Latvia and eight in Estonia) and 2019 (four in Latvia and three in Estonia) about different episodes of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the ensuing tensions between Russia and the West (namely, the controversies around the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest and the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympic Games, the 2018 Skripal family poisoning and the Kerch Strait incident later in the same year), which were reflected in the local and international media. This strategy allowed us to obtain situation-specific knowledge of practices and sentiments as held by these respondents, and also to monitor how these might have changed over the 3-year period (For further details of the study design of the second stage of data collection see Vihalemm and Juzefovičs, 2021.). Prior to these individual interviews, the participants of the study were invited to make voluntary screen recordings from their computers and/or mobile phones.…”

“…According to the second broad category – strategies of political news media use and news selections about the Russia-Ukraine conflict – audience members were divided into three subgroups: (1) stable, partisan audiences with a politically uniform news media menu; (2) dynamic, plural audiences with a politically heterogeneous varied media menu; and (3) apolitical audiences who are not following political news (The audience typology is explained more detail in Vihalemm et al, 2019 and Vihalemm and Juzefovičs, 2021. ).…”

“…In the context of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, these audiences have been critical about Estonian and Latvian public discourses that portray them as being manipulated by Russia (Juzefovičs and Vihalemm, 2020; Vihalemm and Juzefovičs, 2021, 2022). Their standing can be characterized accurately through the concept of transnationalism, according to which populations with a migrant background maintain connections and participate in the social life of the former homeland via long-distance communication networks and virtual arenas (Schiller et al, 1992; Vertovec, 1999).…”