Public Channel

Olga Pasitselska is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She recently published a piece in Human Communication Research on the social negotiation of media trust during the Russian-Ukraine conflict. Given the timeliness of her research, the HCR editors (Yariv Tsfati, University of Haifa, and Steve Wilson, University of South Florida) asked questions about the background, findings, and, and current relevance of her research. Her answers are below; readers also can gain free access to her complete article at https://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/hqac003.

• What motivated you to conduct this research? During my MA, I have studied Russian propaganda and the strategies that propagandists use to lure the public into trusting their stories. Observing the success of the Russian propaganda machine and its political consequences, I was still wondering: why do people "buy" it? This very broad question then became the topic of my PhD dissertation. It studies the reception of propagandistic narratives during the Russian-Ukrainian conflict by the audiences in Eastern Ukraine. Understanding how people decide what is worth their trust in this precarious information environment is, naturally, one of the central questions of my research, and this paper attempts to answer it.
• Briefly, what methods did you use to conduct the research? I have used a novel method of serial focus groups, augmented by individual in-depth interviews with some of the focus group participants. This method allows me to study interactive sense-making in a longitudinal perspective, to gather richer data, and increase the systematicity of the analysis. I conducted focus groups with younger and older participants in three locales in Eastern Ukraine, including a large city, a medium-size town, and a village. 
• What were your key findings?My study demonstrates that audiences decide what to trust based on the folk media theories and group norms that are formed and negotiated in their social environment. In other words, they have certain theories about how the media function, and those theories are spreading inside the community as a kind of a popular wisdom. For instance, my participants distrust media that, to their knowledge, are owned by oligarchs, and even more so when people around them consider the media system as rotten and corrupted. People not only use others' opinions about media messages as a confirmation heuristic and rely on accounts of their acquaintances, but also decide how to check information - and whether to check it at all - based on what is conventional in their social circles.
• You use the notion of "pragmatic media trust" and find that different forms of this type of trust are related to different verification practices. How is the notion of pragmatic trust different from previous conceptualizations of media trust, media cynicism or media scepticism? This notion was introduced by Christian Schwarzenegger, and I use it because it allows me to conceptualize media trust beyond the dichotomy of media trust and media distrust. Pragmatic trust describes the practice of reliance on specific news sources even when audiences remain distrustful of media to varying degrees. For example, when people don't trust specific media channels, but trust the media as an institution, they can expect to get to truthful accounts by checking different venues or by finding a direct quote from an official source. Scepticism refers to the critical but constructive appraisal of journalistic work, while cynicism presupposes disengagement from media systems as they are considered flawed – biased or corrupted. These two responses to perceived media deficiencies do exist in media consumption practice. However, they do not fully describe the users' behaviour during the times of political crisis and information disorder. For sceptics, it becomes cognitively demanding to challenge every news article in the information tide; and cynics cannot completely disengage from the information about political events amidst political turbulence.
• How are your findings relevant to understanding what's happening now following the Russian invasion of Ukraine?Since public trust to the government and to official media sources in Ukraine has grown rapidly since the beginning of the war, I would expect people to verify information through the traditional media and the official social media channels much more than before the war - what I call an "authorization" verification strategy. It will be interesting to follow the changes in Russian public opinion in light of the blatant contradiction between propagandistic images and the outside reality. As trust in governmental sources fades out, audiences might start relying more on their social networks - including those across the border.
• Your study is unique in examining trust in what some see as media that promotes the enemy's agenda in the context of a violent conflict. Do you think that similar situations can be found in other political and violent conflicts? The Ukrainian situation is unique in a sense that there is a bilingual population that consumes (or have consumed until recently) foreign as well as domestic media. However, if we think about post-colonial societies around the world, we can find similar media systems with high levels of corruption and poor journalistic professional norms, where – if conflict arises – we will probably see similar patterns of users' behaviour.
• What else would you like to add? Russia'swar against Ukraine and the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe will certainly change media landscapes and user practices in both countries. And while our results might not reflect this new reality anymore, the research conducted before the war will remain a useful reference point to analyse and understand these changes.