Public Ideology Research Articles

Media Representation of the Russia-Ukraine War: A Comparative Discourse Analysis of Reuters and TASS

This study has examined the linguistic differences in news reports published by Reuters and TASS on four distinct incidents during the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war. Employing discourse analysis as the methodological approach and discourse theory as the theoretical framework, the study has revealed significant linguistic and rhetorical disparities between the two media outlets, highlighting divergent ideological stances and power dynamics. The study has found that Reuters and TASS have employed distinct linguistic strategies that shape public ideologies and perceptions. TASS has portrayed the war from a Russian perspective, referring to it as a "special military operation" while excluding Ukrainian viewpoints. In contrast, Reuters has depicted the war as a full-scale invasion and emphasized allegations of war crimes while also excluding Russian viewpoints. Discrepancies have also emerged in reporting casualties and territorial control, with TASS and Reuters presenting conflicting figures and narratives. Neither outlet has cross-checked information, undermining their objectivity and contributing to biased reporting. The study underscores how the language used by TASS and Reuters serves to legitimize their respective positions and influence public perception, reflecting broader geopolitical power dynamics. Both media agencies have produced misleading narratives by relying solely on official statements from both nations without independent verification.

Identifying stance in legislative discourse: a corpus-driven study of data protection laws

Mirroring public ideologies and value systems in legislative discourse, stance not only functions as a powerful instrument for legislators to balance legal values and stakeholders’ interests but also acts as a valuable reference for individuals to understand legislative texts. This study conducts a corpus-driven analysis of stance expressions in legislative discourse. Using three self-compiled corpora that incorporate data protection laws from the United States, the European Union, and China, we apply Hyland’s stance model to contrastively analyse evidence of hedging, boosting, self-mention, and attitude markers across these jurisdictions and eventually propose a specialised research model of stance in law. This study unveils the nature of modesty and sufficient discursive space of data protection laws, as well as legislative values and public ideologies conveyed by different jurisdictions within the broader socio-legal cultural context. Besides uncovering the legal constructiveness of data protection laws, the results also suggest that the overall representation of stance in data protection legislation aligns with its performance in legislative discourse, which showcases a legislative tendency to achieve an overtly neutral appearance through covert stance expressions.

К истолкованию политической философии М.Е. Салтыкова-Щедрина

The research is to find out the basic features of Mikhail Saltykov’s political thought and to describe it in terms of political criticism of culture. The survey of academic literature on Saltykov shows that any assigning of this writer to one or other sociopolitical parties of his period is problematic: Saltykov does not align to any program of social reforms, rather exploring the thinking subject in political reality. Saltykov’s works do not imply the transmission of ideological meanings, but rather a critique of public ideology. It seems important, however, to take into account the party orientation of Saltykov’s readership: the satirist addresses to a reading community that perceives democratic and egalitarian ideas with sympathy. Analysis of Saltykov’s texts involved a number of categories of political hermeneutics — dichotomies: ideology / philosophy, classical thought / non-classical thought, exoteric / esoteric. The material for the analysis are two satirical tales: “Crucian Carp the Idealist” and “The Sensible Hare”, which are considered similar in genre to the “menippea” of F.M. Dostoevsky. In “Crucian Carp the Idealist” a conflict is revealed between classical and non-classical philosophical approaches; the esoteric plane of the text illustrates the triumph of “Machiavellian” position. In “The Sensible Hare” one can identify a dispute between an ideologist and a political philosopher; paradoxical, in the context of Saltykov’s democratic declarations, is that the ideologist`s position is occupied by the oppressed (slave), and the position of the political philosopher, that is, the subject seeking truth, is taken by the master. The paper concludes with a reflection on metaphysical contour of Saltykov’s political thought: the political theology of the Russian satirist is focused on the eschatological moment as a resolution of political conflicts.

ЗАКОНОДАТЕЛЬСТВО И ДУХОВНО-НРАВСТВЕННАЯ БЕЗОПАСНОСТЬ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ: МЕХАНИЗМЫ СОХРАНЕНИЯ, ЗАЩИТЫ И КОНСТИТУЦИОНАЛИЗАЦИИ

The article is devoted to the consideration of mechanisms for the preservation and protection of traditional spiritual and moral values. The author notes that the adoption of the Decree of the President of the Russian Federation dated 11/19/2022 No. 809 "On Approval of the Foundations of State Policy for the preservation and strengthening of traditional Russian spiritual and moral values" is an important stage in the development of the Russian state and legal system, taking into account its socio-cultural, civilizational background. The emphasis is placed on the fact that the Constitution of the Russian Federation unequivocally prohibits the establishment of a state or mandatory ideology, there are no barriers to the presence of a public ideology in the state. According to the author, it is necessary to consolidate the concept of "traditional spiritual and moral values" in the legislation by making a number of changes to existing normative legal acts. According to the author, the legislation of the Russian Federation should develop along the path of integration of law and morality. A certain set of measures is required to institutionalize state support and protection of traditional spiritual and moral values. To date, there is a legally extremely significant gap in the definition of the concept of "public morality". Ensuring spiritual and moral security and protecting spiritual and moral human rights must be legislatively defined as a priority task of the State. According to the author, the main task of the state today is to preserve the family and the strength of marriage as the basic value of society and the state. The family, as a priority value, should be enshrined in a special federal law, providing this state-forming institution with special guarantees for the realization of the right to a decent existence, cultural and moral security, upbringing and education of children in traditional spiritual traditions.

OTT 성장과 방송 규제체계 개편

The media content market is rapidly reorganizing around global OTTs. Global OTTs are leading the domestic content industry. The problem that arises here is the regulatory imbalance between traditional broadcasting and new OTT. The Broadcasting Act is based on a terrestrial-centered broadcasting regulatory system and has evolved to include new media as they emerge due to technological advancements. As a result, traditional broadcasting, which is subject to the Broadcasting Act, is heavily regulated, while OTT, a new platform, is excluded from regulation. There is a strong argument for bringing OTT and broadcasting under the same regulatory framework.
 Since OTT does not transmit to the public, it does not fall under the concept of broadcasting under the Broadcasting Act. Those who argue for a constitutional broadcasting concept believe that the legislator can form a broadcasting concept, so it is possible to regulate OTT by amending the Broadcasting Act. However, the constitutional broadcasting concept is a legal concept from the past when the influence of terrestrial broadcasting was huge, and it is not valid in today's diversified media environment. Legislation that includes OTT in the broadcasting concept goes against the very nature of broadcasting. It is necessary to enact legislation that creates a new concept that encompasses both OTT and broadcasting, such as the European Union's Audiovisual Media Services Directive.
 It is not an easy task to completely reorganize the broadcasting law and establish a horizontal regulatory system that regulates all video services, including OTT. In Korea, revising the broadcasting law is a highly political issue. The task of reducing the strong public ideology of the broadcasting law and ensuring fair competition among video services is likely to lead to political debate. As the environment of the media content ecosystem is rapidly changing, it is important to prioritize the reform of the regulatory system. It is most urgent to revolutionize the excessive regulations imposed on traditional broadcasting to enable fair competition between traditional broadcasting and OTT. It is realistic to pursue a horizontal regulatory system transformation, including OTT, as a mid- to long-term task. Considering the public's high expectations for public responsibility in broadcasting, legislation that separates public media from commercial media is a feasible way forward.

Are School Reforms Liberal, Conservative, or Populist? Populism and Education Policy Opinions in the United States

ABSTRACT Activists use populist language when proposing school reforms. Are they appealing to a public ideology as coherent as conservatism or liberalism? A national probability sample of U. S. adults is asked to self-identify as liberals or conservatives, respond to statements about government trustworthiness and responsiveness to the people, and give views on education policies and institutions. Conservative-liberal and populist-Burkean scales are constructed, with Burke’s advocacy of trusteeship serving as populism’s antipode. Populism is more strongly associated than conservativism with many, though not all, school policy positions. Populism appears as coherent an ideology as conservativism and liberalism.

Innovation vs inertia: Entrepreneurial governments in 21st‐century rural Alberta

AbstractRural development in Alberta is a long‐standing challenge, with local communities and economies often stuck between economic cycles, fiscal largesse from the Provincial Government, and a historical pattern of conservative leadership that seeks to leave the private sector unimpeded. As a result, many rural communities now face significant economic, social, political, and ecological challenges that, while not unique to Alberta, are marked by only modest innovation and a tendency to return to previous developmental initiatives. This paper is focused upon identifying the common challenges facing municipal government in the province, but also accounting for the inertial dynamics within municipal politics. Drawing from qualitative data collected from rural municipalities, it seeks to situate contemporary adaptive economic strategies and initiatives within the dominant public ideology of the province. This paper argues that while reform initiatives undertaken in the province broadly align with pragmatic municipalism as a necessary response to decades of neoliberal austerity and inertia, that pragmatism is tempered by a provincial rationality that limits, rather than enhances, the likelihood of meaningful change. This rationality, and its effects, are explained through four fallacies: home rule, agency, the Golden Age, and homogeneity.

Challenging Folk-Linguistics: Grammatical and Spelling Variation in Students’ Writing in Hebrew on WhatsApp and in Essays

Abstract With the increasing use of mobile phones among young people, there is growing public concern about possible detrimental effects of digital writing on learners’ literacy and language skills. We ask whether and to what extent nonstandard forms typical of spoken Hebrew and of digital communication are also found in the formal writing of high-school students. To this end, we compare between two corpora of Modern Hebrew: a naturalistic corpus of 7,120 WhatsApp messages (35,085 words) written by 80 students in three classroom WhatsApp groups and a corpus of 291 school essays (34,700 words) written by 291 students. The findings indicate that a rather clear distinction is maintained between adherence to traditional formal writing in school essays as opposed to a more lenient approach on WhatsApp. The findings thus provide empirical linguistic evidence challenging the predominant folk-linguistic public ideology.

Новые формы популяризации правовых знаний в популярно-юридическом дискурсе и его жанрах

The article studies the way transformed traditional forms of popularization of legal knowledge in Russia impact the popular legal discourse. The form of popularization is perceived by the author as a permanent communicative model used by popularizers to increase legal awareness of non-specialists. Traditional forms of science popularization are subject to modification due to the emergence of new channels and means of communication. To interact with the target recipient, popularizers use a hybrid popular legal discourse, which enables them to disseminate legal knowledge in a comprehensible (adapted) form and maintain a steady interest of the community in legal issues. Depending on the communication channel used by the popularizer to convey the message to the audience, the author distinguishes a distant, distant-virtualized, monovirtual, contact-virtualized and contact types of popular legal discourse. Attention is drawn to the chronotope and participants of the types of discourse in question, as well as to the interdiscursive interaction in genre varieties of Russian popular legal discourse. Adapting to the changed conditions of communication, the polycode and hybridization potential of the popular legal discourse has reached a new level. In addition to informing the audience and shaping the public ideology, modern popular legal discourse also performs a recreational function. Entertainment is becoming an integral component of the texts of modern popular discourse, which makes it possible to gain and hold the attention of the public in a highly competitive environment.

Dog Dreams: Oneiric Representations of Interspecies Sociality among Middle-Class Young Adults in the United States

Abstract The investigation of human dreaming offers significant insights to scholars of human-nonhuman animal studies. This article proposes that the ways in which companion species appear in humans’ dreams reveal the implicit ontological assumptions that undergird waking-life interspecies relationships. Focusing on dreams about dogs among middle-class U.S. college students, the analysis develops an updated model of dreaming that is synthesized from recent neuroscientific and anthropological theory-building. Themes of warm companionship, anxiety about dogs’ welfare, and preoccupations about their mortality suggest that dreams about dogs simulate and rehearse interspecies sociality in a cultural frame. They demonstrate both interspecies intersubjectivity and the significant place of canine persons in U.S. middle-class dreamers’ conceptualizations of their social networks. Such dreams challenge the public ideology of human exceptionalism, and suggest that human-canine sociality – in both waking and oneiric modes – may emerge as much from “egomorphic” as from anthropomorphic dispositions.

UNSUR SEMANTIK DEBAT PUBLIK PASANGAN CALON PADA PILGUB JATIM 2018: KAJIAN ANALISIS WACANA KRITIS [Semantic Elements of the Candidate Pair’s Public Debate in the 2018 East Java Governor Election A Study of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

The title of this article is "Semantic Elements / Meaning of the Words of the Public Debate of Candidate Pairs in the 2018 East Java Gubernatorial Election in conveying the East Java development program for the Next Five Years: A Study of Critical Discourse Analysis (AWK)." The issue raised is how the semantic element/meaning of the word public debate of the candidate pairs in the 2018 East Java Pilgub in conveying the East Java development program for the next five years: Critical Discourse Analysis (AWK). The objectives of this study are: to describe, interpret, and explain the semantic elements/meaning of words used by the candidate pairs in the 2018 gubernatorial election in conveying the East Java development program for the next five years. The theories used are public debate, campaign language, pilkada, and critical discourse analysis/awk: public debate, campaign, ideology, election, and critical discourse analysis/AWK. The research method used is the qualitative method. The results showed that the semantic elements/meaning of words (1) experience value: (a) ideologically fought words, (b) presented metaphors, (2) relational values: (a) euphemistic expressions, (b) choice of words formal, and (3) expressive value: (a) words that express positive evaluations, (b) words that express negative evaluations.

Performing Representational Labor: Blackness, Indigeneity, and Legibility in Global Latinx Media Cultures

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes the representational work and institutional reception of two contemporary transnational icons, singer/actress Amara La Negra and actress Yalitza Aparicio. The author argues that Amara La Negra and Yalitza Aparicio disrupt the dominant trope of racial ambiguity circulating in transnational media representations of Latina womanhood. In doing so, these two public figures rupture hegemonic racial ideologies embedded in colonial regimes via their self-fashioning in media. This essay also documents how Amara La Negra and Yalitza Aparicio are received by various media outlets in both English-and Spanish language markets in order to understand how their representations register within current racial formations in the Americas. The analysis reveals that Amara La Negra and Yalitza Aparicio perform both legible and illegible representational labor because while their presence and activism broadens the contours of how Latinidad is depicted globally, their messages are deemed illegible or threatening depending on the media context. In particular, within English-language media they are deemed as the exotic, foreign Other while in Spanish-language media their claims to Blackness and Indigeneity are either outright refused or ridiculed.

Cultural Form of Manifestation of Value Models in the Interaction of Personal Values and Social Structures

Value models in society are often positioned as key factors in the formation of interpersonal interaction. In this regard, the process of forming a value model should be considered based on the pattern of social interaction. In cultural studies, as in other socio-humanities, such an internal branch of knowledge as cultural axiology was also formed. In general, cultural axiology is correlated with the implementation of the value approach as a general scientific approach. However, in cultural studies, this approach has its own specifics. The use of a value-based approach in cultural studies allows highlighting the inner side of the relationship between an individual and society. The scientific novelty of the study is determined by the structural content of the formation of values and their correlation with the practical values of the development of the social system. The authors show that the main importance is achieved through the interaction between the paradigm of social development and the expectations of the population in the process of spreading state or public ideology. The paper defines that the main goal remains to determine the possibility of adapting the social value model and the global cultural paradigm. The practical significance of the study is determined by the need to adapt post-structural social development and mitigate the transformation of the paradigm of social development in crisis socio-political periods.

The expression of "United Front" in "Salvation Daily" under the textual analysis method

With the rapid development of the Internet and new media, online public opinion shows the direction of diversified demands. Domestically, it has become more difficult for the official media to lead public opinion, and internationally, the work in the field of ideology is still complicated. The "unification" of public ideology is crucial in solving various social problems, such as the Taiwan issue, and in strengthening and improving the methods and approaches of social management. The Salvation Daily was a newspaper that came into being during the period of total resistance in the last century, and it was also a newspaper for the united front in the cultural sector. During its brief period of operation, the Daily Salvation Daily reached a daily circulation of 8,000 copies in its heyday, and its influence spread to Hunan, Guangdong, Guangxi, Jiangxi, Sichuan, and even Hong Kong and Nanyang. The Salvation Daily became one of the most influential progressive newspapers in the entire southwest region and played a significant role in promoting the "United Front" of the whole nation. This paper uses textual analysis to analyze the news texts and newspaper characteristics of the Salvation Daily during the war period, to explore the success of its "united front" propaganda and "national unity" consciousness, as well as its contribution to today's "united front" ideological work. The paper also discusses the success of its "United Front" propaganda and "national unity" awareness-raising work, as well as the inspiration it brings to the present-day "United Front" ideological work.

Travelling Europe, Travelling through Crisis: Disintegrated Journeys in Dorota Masłowska’s A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians and Zinnie Harris’s How To Hold Your Breath

The article reflects on the issues of European social, political and ethical disintegration by looking at two plays which represent both geographic and mental migration of European citizens. Zinnie Harris’s play dramatizes a journey by an energetic businesswoman from the state of seeming success to the condition of collapse of the entire continent. Masłowska’s drama tells the story of a couple who have lost their geographic but also existential bearings after a prolonged bout of drug abuse and partying. The article aims at presenting the European continent as a space of alienated social and personal experience, as a community of people in permanent exile from both the private space and the public ideologies. The two plays offer a reflection on the condition of pre-Brexit Europe with the power of capturing representative lives of those individuals who have lost the sense of the common cause.

Image of Motherland in Russian and Japanese Linguocultures

The images of motherland in Russian and Japanese linguocultures are juxtaposed on the basis of association experiments. Russian culture is analyzed along two samplings – that of the early 1990s and that of the early 21st century. In order to compare their data, relevant associative fields were first split into four major semantic components, namely: logical perception, moral and ethic perception, bodily perception, and emotional perception. It was demonstrated that in both linguocultures the image of motherland was perceived in large part positively. It was evidenced once again that Russians of both periods tended to epitomize individualism, while the Japanese were obviously collectivist. Predictably, the worldviews of Russian respondents of both time periods saw much more congruence than the worldviews of Russians (from both samplings) and the Japanese. Meanwhile, post-perestroika Russians weren’t inclined to reflect over the image of their motherland or critisize it which is most noticeably evidenced by the percent-age of data pertaining to components of the associative fields under study related to bodily perception. The reason for such a reflection fatigue lay highly likely in the cultural shock provoked by the collapse of the Soviet Union and ac-companied by the discredit of its public ideology. Such an attitude was not registered in 21st century Russians and the Japanese. Love for the wild nature of their respective countries is a characteristic feature mostly of the 1990s Russians and the Japanese, but not salient in the 21st century Russians who expressed it to a lesser extent.

Measuring Constituency Ideology Using Bayesian Universal Kriging

AbstractIn this article, we develop and make available measures of public ideology in 2010 for the 50 American states, 435 congressional districts, and state legislative districts. We do this using the geospatial statistical technique of Bayesian universal kriging, which uses the locations of survey respondents, as well as population covariate values, to predict ideology for simulated citizens in districts across the country. In doing this, we improve on past research that uses the kriging technique for forecasting public opinion by incorporating Alaska and Hawaii, making the important distinction between ZIP codes and ZIP Code Tabulation Areas, and introducing more precise data from the 2010 Census. We show that our estimates of ideology at the state, congressional district, and state legislative district levels appropriately predict the ideology of legislators elected from these districts, serving as an external validity check.

Who influences higher education decision-making in Taiwan? An analysis of internal stakeholders

ABSTRACT In the past two decades, Taiwan has gone through a series of drastic higher education transformations in response to the multi-faceted demands from globalization and domestic social change. Among the driving forces, new public management and neoliberal ideology have reshaped the nature and culture of higher education in Taiwan. The current study focuses on the broader internal stakeholders’ relationships to higher education policy as they systematically engage with governance through decision-making. We empirically explore who the main actors are that make decisions at the ministerial level. The study identifies six key groups with different characteristics and traits. Acting as coalitions, these groups frequently influence policy formulation. Moreover, their influential paths – identified as elite approach, professional engagement, and political networking – jointly steer higher education decision-making. These triangular paths serve as a valuable conceptual framework to understand the complicated influential paths from internal stakeholders who have affected Taiwan’s higher education policy.

Making Enemies: the Mainstream Media Spectacle and US Foreign Policy

Abstract As Herbert Schiller long ago observed, the mainstream (corporate) media (MSM) in the US have long been instruments of state power. However, since the nineteenth century, the reading public has relied on the news media as a pillar, albeit flawed, of a liberal democratic society. While the public still regards a “free press” as essential to democracy, it no longer has confidence that the mainstream media deserve that status. Trust levels in the MSM have plummeted since the 1970s, reflecting a larger pattern of distrust of public and private institutions in general, including the US Congress. Even many media professionals themselves do not see the US as defending the freedom of investigative journalism. Moreover, the quality of corporate media, more owner-concentrated than ever, has declined, often to the level of tabloid spectacle, as profit-oriented news departments try to compete with a wide array of 24/7 news platforms, including those coming from social media. The era of neoliberalism has all but eliminated the public service ideology behind news and public affairs reporting, and concurrently there has emerged a crisis of state legitimacy that threatens the foundations of the liberal democratic order.

X-phemisms, or On the difficulty in distinguishing between euphemisms and dysphemisms

The present paper attempts to examine the existing approaches to the study on euphemisms and dysphemisms. The paper finds that the study on euphemisms and dysphemisms should be based on the holistic approach that entails combining particular aspects of diverse fields and provides a comprehensive understanding of language as a cognitive-communicative, sociocultural and biopsychological phenomenon. Applying both functional-pragmatic and diachronic approaches proves to be effective in identifying euphemisms and dysphemisms and distin- guishing between them. The results of the study indicate that not all low colloquialisms may be considered dysphemisms, although in some cases pejorative words, taboos and vulgarisms may serve as a conceptual source of dysphemisms. The study reveals that there can be no such notion as universal euphemism or universal dysphemism as the status of a word is determined by a set of social attitudes that may vary between dialect groups and even between individual members of the same community. Thus, when distinguishing between euphemisms and dysphemisms one should take into consideration diachronic meaning change, the current context, the previous context, subject-object relationship. The research data is taken from English socio-political discourse, media discourse, English monolingual and etymology dictionaries. The choice of the research data stems from the fact that media discourse and socio-political discourse reflect public ideologies and values, which allows to monitor diachronic meaning change conditioned by social factors. In addition to it, the dynamic nature of x-phemisms becomes observable in socio-political and media experiential contexts.