Svetlana Bodrunova1; 1 St.Petersburg State University, Russian Federation
Discussion
The COVID-19 pandemic found Russia in a state of fundamental fragmentation of public opinion, compounded by a rise in authoritarian leadership style and practices, as well as media polarization. Top-down political communication from the authorities spun the decisions in a way to make them appear to demonstrate openness and equanimity, while media became ‘informationalist’, and people largely mistrusted both the official statistics and the measures that were introduced but followed partially at best. We argue that a long-term break in trust between political power, the media, and the public has played a crucial role in how Russia reacted to the challenge of COVID-19. We describe the ‘triangle of distrust’ between these three elements of public political communication and reconstruct the paternalist discourse of the state that provided controversial signals to the population, due to its simultaneity with the previous line of ‘besieged castle’ argument in international politics. Media, in their turn, abused the situation of public uncertainty and alertness to squeeze clickbait revenues from the reader, without addressing public fears. This has, at least partly, fostered vaccine hesitancy and low levels of anti-Sars-Cov-II vaccination in the country.
