Political manipulation of the media (on the example of mass media of the Republic of Tatarstan)

Abstract

Modern social processes are characterized by the growth of media influence, the accretion of media power, called the mediacracy. The social, political, and power impact of various state institutions are increasingly replaced by the information and psychological influence. In the system of social relations there is an increase in the information component, received from the press. However, along with the advantages of information exchange, there are complexities, objectively appearing from this issue, one of which is manipulation in the mass media. It is known, that the activation of these processes occurs during the pre-election period. In this regard, there is a profound social and scientific need to study the practices of media manipulation. This allows to have a new perspective look at the specifics of presentation of politicized facts, events, and to evaluate them. In this respect, the regional system of mass media remains an understudied segment. The analysis of leading mass publications of the Republic of Tatarstan shows, that their authors do not create fundamentally new events, but place emphasis on the ongoing processes. Despite the differences in the typology of publications (state and commercial media), they use similar manipulative technologies: differences are only in the combination of technologies and the frequency of their use. The goals of media manipulation are the promotion of candidate, the formation of the necessary image characteristics (positive and/or negative), the fixation of pre-set stereotypes in the public consciousness. The specifics of information support of the political campaign for the election of the President of the Republic of Tatarstan in 2015, on the basis of the analysis of forms, methods of its essential features, in the leading periodicals of the region, were defined in this study, in the time and content continuum.