Article
A provocative event, media, and religious choice in post-Soviet Russia
This paper uses the famous events related to Pussy Riot as a natural experiment to examine the effect of alternative media on church membership. A difference-in-differences strategy is used to explore the effect in question. The hypothesis is that, given a lack of religious background in the majority of the population and strong temporary interest in religious issues promoted by a particular provocative event, mass media substantially affect religious choice. To check if this is the case, I compare the dynamics of religious choice of those exposed to alternative media reports on church topics and the rest of the population. As a proxy of familiarity with an alternative view, I use a dummy variable for using the Internet to obtain news. The main finding is that, during the experiment run over the year 2012, the growth of self-reported Orthodox believers was significantly lower in the treatment group than in the control group. Exposure to alternative media coverage turned out to heavily affect religious choice.
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The article considers the main trends in the contemporary media space and analyzes the coverage of Russia issues in online versions of USA Today and The New York Times. The ideas of M. McLuhan, D. McQuail, J. Van Deijck, M. Castells form the theoretical basis of the research. USA Today and The New York Times provide free access to most of their materials which are available for the computer, Iphone, and Ipad users. Video and slide-shows attract readers from all over the world. Russia became actual theme in 2014 in the US media, but it had been peripheral during the previous decade. Sochi Olympiad, Crimea unification with the RF, conflict in Ukraine, Putin, - those were the main topics of USA Today and The New York Times related to Russia. USA Today's coverage of Russian problems was more neutral and balanced compared to tough rhetoric of The New York Times. At the same time both newspapers view the country as an “alien”, but not an enemy.
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