Популистка пропаганда в контекст на социална самота
Populist Propaganda and Social Solitude

Summary/Abstract: Paper draws on 13 semi-structured interviews with journalists from printmedia and information websites to outline their perceptions of their professional world. The interviews were conducted between March and June, 2016, in the frames of the research on the anti-democratic propaganda in Bulgaria. Without exaggeration, both the analysis of media and the interviews with journalists have shown the disintegration of the field of journalism as a dif- ferentiated field in Bulgaria. What is this due to? Our interviewees explained it with the commercialization and shift in focus from winning trust to secur- ing higher ratings – the media have come to be understood as entertainment and journalism is trying to adjust to this “commercial” requirement. But this is not the main (or at least not the sufficient) reason. The market, in turn, is changing under pressure from free online media, the reorientation of television towards new formats (of entertainment), and the subsequent fragmentation of audiences. What differentiates print media and news websites however is the drastic merge of entertainment and direct politics through omerta on certain topics and names, through advertorials that are not properly (if at all) marked as such and all this – in the lack of information who the owner of the media is. Our interviewees share a common practical dilemma: you either do journalism, or work for a media corporation. If one wants to do proper journalism, one has to withdraw from the topics of the day to the safer territories of marginal topics.

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