FACTORS INFLUENCING LEVEL OF TRUST IN THE RUSSIAN STATE MAINSTREAM MEDIA NEWS: CASE OF MOSCOW UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

Abstract

In the modern social sciences, the concept of trust is considered an essential element of the socio-cultural potential of each given society. The credibility (trustworthiness) of the media is a set of ideas and attitudes of the audience that allow government institutions to increase or maintain their social resources, at the time of the rise of information through the Internet is rising in Russia, and the overall propensity to trust by the Russian society is falling. Overall trust in general and trust in mass media, in particular, are of interest to researchers from various fields of science: sociology, social psychology, economics, political science, public administration, and philosophy, and in each of fields scientists have already made a considerable contribution to understanding the various aspects of this phenomenon and although given the increasing relevance of the issue of trust in modern society, this object has great research potential.

The goal of this work was to establish a causational relationship between the level of trustworthiness (social capital) of the political power (via its administration and mass media) and the level of trust in its messages by Moscow undergraduate students.

Quantitative data analysis was performed using the survey responses from 401 undergraduate students in Moscow’s ten universities. The sample was constructed in proportion to the structure of the population of Moscow undergraduate students.

The findings suggest that the current Russian Government’s approach to increasing the level of competence of government and MSM is insufficient, greatly offset by the presence of alternative sources of information in cyberspace (collectively referred to as AIM in this work). Specifically, the values of Government and MSM directly influence the level of trust in the MSM news. This research identified various elements of social capital that influence the level of trust in MSM news as well as the Propensity to Trust, an innate quality highly specific to each respondent.

This research demonstrated a link between elements of the Social Capital of government and public institutions and levels of trust in State MSM. At the same time, it became evident that lower levels of values of the Russian government and State MSM lowered the overall trust in state MSM news. Alternative Internet Media, on the other hand, having a higher level of values draws more and more audiences from the traditional MSM, which certainly indicated people’s attitudes, not least of which is trust. At the same time, this work demonstrated that people's innate Propensity to Trust also influences their level of trust in Russian State MSM. In the revised hypothesis, it was hypothesized that Propensity to Trust can be altered over time, which brings us back to the old debate of Nature vs nurture, which involves the extent to which particular aspects of behavior (Propensity to Trust) are a product of either inherited (i.e., genetic) or acquired (i.e., learned) influences, such as social conditioning.

-