Young People's Perception of Russian State-Controlled Media News Reports

Modern authoritarian regimes survive not because they carry out mass repression, but because they manage to convince citizens that they are competent with the help of state media. Russia is a good example of such a regime, and the main media asset of the state is certainly television, which is almost completely controlled by the authorities. News on state channels is biased and broadcasts only the point of view of officials, but nevertheless, it is the main source of information for many Russians and at the same time one of the most convincing media formats, because "a picture, especially a moving one, cannot lie." However, the audience of news programs of state TV is limited, most often when trying to describe it, researchers are limited to demographic characteristics: age over 45, average income or below average. Those who do not consume news on TV are usually characterized as younger citizens under the age of 45. From this characteristic, it is not at all obvious why, among all sources of information, some citizens prefer television news, while others deliberately avoid it. State television does not exist in a vacuum – its discourse and agenda also permeates places where people who avoid news reports on television do not expect to see it at all, for example, in social networks, where excerpts from news broadcasts of state channels can become viral videos. There is also a passive consumption of news on state channels – if a person does not find an interesting program on TV, then he is very likely to leave the TV on, and other residents of his household remain unwitting consumers of television content. It is obvious from research that even passive and random content consumption has a certain impact on a person's values and political attitudes, but it is not at all obvious how exactly it manifests itself: some researchers believe that encountering content that does not correspond to a person's attitudes can lead to greater polarization of the community, while others convincingly state that such random content consumption can, on the contrary, reduce the effect of "Echo Chambers". Young people were chosen as a category for the study not by chance, because their current media practices are a way to look into the future