Politinės realybės konstravimas žiniasklaidoje ir auditorijos suvokimas: atvejo analizė ; Political reality construction in media and audience perception: case study

Abstract

The object of this master thesis is the presentation of political reality in media. As a theoretical background of research a framing theory was chosen. This theory concentrates on analysis of the thinking schemes of individuals and other social institutes. The main problem of this thesis is that media informs about the political issues through its own prism and constructs the frames which determine the corresponding event's interpretations. This problem leaded to a hypothesis of the thesis: media uses various tools for political issues enlightement and these tools imply the possible means of reading a message and creation of meanings. The aim of this thesis was both to present a theoretical background of political reality construction on the basis of framing and to study the tools of media framing construction via analysis of a specific event. For the achievement of this aim the following tasks were raised and implemented: to present the evolution of media effects overall and its political influence particularly, to present the framing theory and the reasons of framing usage in media, to analyse the framing factors and its relation with the frames constructed by the audience itself, to analyze a context of the specific political issue presented in this thesis, to research the media material about this issue and to determine the possible constructed meanings in these messages and to analyse the audience perception of this political issue being communicated through media. Due to the reason that the object of this work relates with the construction of possible meanings, the research was made by using two qualitative methods: semiotical analysis of video news reportages and semi-standartised interviews with experts (specialists of political communication, political sociology and journalist). The data received by both methods supplemented each other and provided both wide and detalised view of political reality construction in media aspects and audience perception. After implemented analysis of the theoretical aspects of framing and research of the specific political issue's enlighmenent in media, the hypothesis of this thesis was proved.