Открытый семинар проекта "Цифровые медиа в эпоху пандемии" с участием президента CAER Марты Н. Лукачович

The importance of the media’s role in framing the massages, and consequently impacting the public perceptions, is frequently discussed by global scholars as well as by broader communities of media professionals and audiences. While the COVID-19 pandemic has been testing the crisis responsesacross nations, it has alsocontributed to theintensificationof the debates around media and their influence.

The concept of "securitized framing" implies that a severe existential threat requires extraordinary means of response; for example, a pandemic can be framed as such peril that must be addressed by significant alterations in the public behaviors. This process can be considered a securitization of a pandemic. Indeed, many public officials around the world advanced this type of frame. Media are the key channels to amplify such a frame but may also contest it. In my recent article, I explored the instances in Russia, Slovakia, and the United States,when media influencers, as well as some rather marginal rogue actors, offered reframing of the main securitized governmental narrative.

Powerful Russian media figures enjoy some conspiracy theories but prudently avoid direct challenges to the government’s frame, and thus far only peripheral actors openly advance dissenting frames. Slovakia plummetedfrom one of themost effective countries in the crisisresponse to tragically becoming the world leader in deaths-per-capita in February 2021, while the pandemic denialframehas been advanced by far-right-wing political and media personalities.  The polarized political and media environment in the United States has demonstrated a particularly fertile ground for rogue grassroots movements that utilize online platforms and social media, at times going as far as encouragement of violence and even terrorist acts to oppose the government and its pandemic response policy.

Through the seminar, we willfurther explore media’s part in these processes. While the analyzed cases are different on many levels, we will aim to separate the idiosyncrasies from the more generalizable lessons. National contexts continue to be increasingly intertwined with broader complicated crises, such as borderless health threats and looming problems of extremism and political violence. At the same time, the conversations are intertwined as they are simultaneously happening on both local and globalized media platforms. Professionals in the fields of media, public relations, and strategic communication should acknowledge the complex nature of current crises and the media conversations that surround them. Moreover, the members of the widerpublic who wish to elevate their media literacy can also grasp important pointers from understanding different international cases of securitization of COVID-19.